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Journey to a RevolutionA Personal Memoir and History
of the
Hungarian Revolution
of 1956
�
M I C H A E L K O R D A
For Margaret, with love—
and for Morton L. Janklow,
my friend of more than four decades,
for his enthusiasm and our shared
love of history
Talpra magyar,
hí a haza!
itt as idő,
most vagy soha!
—Petőfi Sándor, Nemzeti dal
Arise, Magyars,
The country calls!
It’s now or never,
What fate befalls . . .
—Sándor Petőfi, “National Poem”
C O N T E N T S
1. The Idol with Feet of Clay 1
2. Hungary: The Mythic Nation and the Real One 15
3. Hungary and the Cold War 28
4. Salami Tactics 65
5. “Arise, Magyars!” 91
6. “Long Live Free, Democratic, and
Independent Hungary!” 111
7. Götterdämmerung on the Danube 157
8. A Much Fought-Over City 176
9. “Slaves We Shall No Longer Be!” 201
Acknowledgments 207
About the Author
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Credits
Notes 209
Bibliography 211
Epigraph iii
Preface vii
Index 213
Other Books by Michael Korda
P R E F A C E
Nothing presents more difficulties than writing an objec-
tive account of a great event in which one has participated
oneself. Being objective about the Hungarian Revolution of
1956 is hard enough to begin with—it is a kind of modern
David and Goliath story, except that Goliath won—but harder
still for somebody who participated in it, like myself, and who
was present at some of the major moments. The abbé Sieyès,
when asked what he did during the French Revolution, replied,
Je l ’ai survécu (“I survived it”). I suppose I can, at the very least,
make the same claim, but I also witnessed demonstrations of
almost unbelievable courage, of shameless political betrayal,
and of the kind of unrestrained military brute force and vio-
lence against civilians of which the twentieth century was so
full, and which do not seem to have ended so far in the early
years of the twenty-first.
Although there is no doubt that the events of October 1956
constituted a revolution, they swiftly became something else:
a war.
The revolution was spontaneous, popular, and embraced
every segment of society, including many members of the Hun-
garian communist party. It was a revolution against tyranny—
against a singularly brutal and despotic single-party government
that punished even the mildest dissent with extreme cruelty,
including torture and death; that methodically stifled every
form of self-expression and suppressed every individual impulse;
and that was more Stalinist than Stalin himself had been.
It was also a revolution against eleven years of alien, heavy-
handed, unyielding Russian domination and occupation. The
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 swept away the communist par-
ty’s control over every aspect of Hungarian life, and for a time
forced the army of the Soviet Union to retreat before an angry
armed body of “Freedom Fighters,” as they came to be known,
consisting of workers, students, Hungarian army personnel, and
ordinary civilians—men, women, and children. At that point
the Soviet Union launched a full-scale war against the Hungar-
ian people, suppressed the revolution, and handed the country
back to the hard-core Hungarian communist bureaucrats and
their feared and hated “security service.”
Fifty years after the revolution, we are living in a very differ-
ent world, one in which Hungary is a prosperous member of the
European Union and of NATO; in which the Soviet Union has
ceased to exist; and in which communism is virtually extinct
except in China and Cuba. It is therefore important to remind
ourselves of these events—for without the bravery of the men
and women who fought in 1956, we might today still be living
in the world of the cold war, of monolithic communism in east-
ern Europe, and of nuclear stalemate.
I hesitated for some time before deciding to include myself
in this account of the revolution, but it seemed to me that many
Prefaceviii
of these events benefit from being described by an eyewitness.
I have tried to strike a balance between history and memoir, and
have not tried to write a “first-person account,” since there were
of course many things I did not see or participate in, and since
my own experiences in the streets of Budapest in 1956 were pri-
marily those of an observer. Many others took far greater risks
than I did, and it is in their memory that I have written this book.
Throughout, I have tried to set down as accurately as I can
what took place and why without sensationalism. In the days
while I was in Budapest many things happened of a personal
nature which I have not described here—this book is about the
Hungarians and their revolution, not about me.
“I am a camera,” Christopher Isherwood wrote of his presence
in Berlin in the years just before the Nazis came to power, “with
its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. . . . Some
day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
So it was, and is, for me. I was a camera. I have recorded cer-
tain scenes as they were, fixed in my memory, like the black-
and-white images of a war photographer, to give the reader an
impression of what it was like to be in the middle of a revolu-
tion, and to show just what it is like to be on the spot when his-
tory and politics take to the streets.
But before one can explain the revolution, one must first
explain what the cold war was like, in the days when the Iron
Curtain was real, and still freshly built, dividing Europe in two
as if it had been cut by a knife.
Preface ix
1.
The Idol with Feet of Clay
F ew things stand out less clearly at the time than a turning
point in history, at any rate when one is living through it.
As a rule it is only in retrospect that an event can be seen clearly
as a turning point. Historians write as if they were looking at
the past in the rearview mirror of a moving car; and, of course,
picking the “turning points” of history is something of a specialty
for many historians—in some cases, the more obscure, the better.
Turning points, however, are much harder to recognize as they
occur, when one is looking ahead through the windshield.
To take an example, we now recognize that the Battle of
Britain was a turning point in World War II—fewer than 2,000
young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force handed Hitler his
first defeat, and ensured that whatever else was going to happen
in 1940, Great Britain would not be invaded—but those who
lived through the Battle of Britain day by day did not perceive
it as a decisive, clear-cut event. The fighter pilots were too
exhausted and battle-weary to care; and the public, while buoyed
by the victories of the R.A.F. in the sky over southern England,
2 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
was still struggling to come to grips with the evacuation of the
British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and the collapse of
France, and would soon be plunged into the first stages of what
later came to be known as the blitz. Those who—as children—saw
the white contrails of the aircraft swirling overhead in the blue
summer sky, or watched the shiny brass cartridge cases come
tumbling down by the thousands, had no sense of being wit-
nesses to a “turning point”; nor did their elders. It was only
much later that this turning point began to be perceived as one,
and that Battle of Britain Day was added to the list of annual
British patriotic celebrations.
In much the same way, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956,
while it was clearly a major event, was not perceived as a turning
point in history until much later, when the unexpected disinte-
gration of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe, followed very
shortly by the total collapse of the Soviet Union itself, could be
traced back to the consequences of the uprising in the streets of
Budapest.
The three weeks of the Hungarian Revolution ended, of
course, in a victory for the Soviet Union, as everybody knows,
but not since Pyrrhus himself has there been so Pyrrhic a vic-
tory. The Hungarians had chipped the first crack in the impos-
ing facade of Stalinist communism and had exposed the Soviet
Union’s domination of eastern Europe for the brutal sham it
was. For the first time, people in the West—even those on the
left—had seen the true face of Soviet power, and it shocked
them.
The Hungarians lost, but in the long run the Russians lost
more. Communism became much harder to sell as a humane
alternative to capitalism (or to western European democratic
socialism); and the Russians themselves, badly shaken by the
size and the ferocity of the uprising they had put down with such
The Idol with Feet of Clay 3
overwhelming force, and dismayed by the attention it received
in the world’s media, never attempted to repeat the experience
in Europe. From time to time, the tanks might be sent rumbling
into the streets again, as they were in Prague in 1968, but they
would not henceforth open fire on civilians. Without apparently
having given the matter much thought, the Russians discarded
the trump card in their hand: the belief on the part of eastern
Europeans that the Red Army would shoot them down merci-
lessly if they rose against the puppet governments the Soviet
Union had imposed on them at the end of World War II.
More dangerous still, those governments themselves, whose
ultimate legitimacy rested on the threat of armed intervention by
the Soviet Union, ceased to believe that it would ever intervene
again to support them with force the way it did in Hungary
in 1956—and if the Russians would not, then how, when push
came to shove, were the “people’s governments” of Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic,
Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania to remain in power over the
long haul?
This is always a serious problem of empire, by no means limited
to the Soviet Union. In 1919, the United Kingdom used violence,
albeit on a considerably smaller scale, against the congress party in
India when General Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on dem-
onstrators in Amritsar, killing 379 of them at Jallianwallah Bagh,
and wounding perhaps three times as many. The massacre horri-
fied the British—except for the impenitent General Dyer and his
supporters—and the result was an increasing reluctance on the
part of the British government to use force against the congress
party at all. In consequence, the threat of armed violence—one
of the pillars on which the raj stood—gradually became more
and more remote and unlikely. The Indians ceased to fear it, the
4 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
British grew increasingly unwilling to use it on a large scale, and
independence for India thus became only a matter of time.
In much the same way, the Hungarians’ uprising against their
own unpopular government and the government’s Soviet masters,
while it failed, fatally shook the confidence of the Soviet govern-
ment in its ability to control the countries of eastern Europe—a
confidence that had already been weakened by Stalin’s death, by
the increasingly (and defiantly) independent attitude of Tito’s
Yugoslavia, and by the widening ideological rift between the
Russian and the Chinese communist parties.
After 1956, the Soviet Union found itself in an increasingly
uncomfortable and ambivalent position vis-à-vis the eastern
European “people’s democracies,” since the Soviet leadership was
desperately trying to dismantle the remnants of Stalinism at
home and bring about a “thaw” in Russian life, while at the same
time continuing to prop up unrepentantly Stalinist leaders in the
Soviet Union’s client states. In the Politburo there was a dawn-
ing realization that the Soviet Union was in a race against time
to create a viable consumer economy while still maintaining and
modernizing its huge armed forces, as well as to allow a greater
degree of freedom of expression than had been thinkable under
Stalin without altogether losing the party’s ultimate control of
the media.
This was a tricky balancing act for Stalin’s contentious heirs,
akin to a herd of elephants trying to walk a tightrope. While
performing this miracle, the members of the Politburo did not
want their attention to be diverted toward the “satellite coun-
tries,” as the eastern European communist regimes were called in
the West, or the “fraternal socialist countries,” as they were called
in the Soviet Union. It was the job of the eastern European lead-
ers to maintain discipline and order in their countries—in short,
The Idol with Feet of Clay 5
to keep everything frozen, “on ice”—a job which was by no
means easy to do when the Soviet Union itself was experiment-
ing, however gingerly, with a thaw.
It was the unhappy lot of the Hungarians in 1956 to be the
first people to seriously challenge Russian hegemony in eastern
Europe—not just to challenge it intellectually, or with speeches,
which was already dangerous enough, but to challenge it with
armed force. The Russians’ response was instinctive, brutal, and
violent—in effect, to do exactly what Stalin would have done—
but cruel and harsh as the suppression of the Hungarian rebellion
was, it was not followed by the kind of widespread terror that
would have come naturally to Stalin. Certainly, many Hungarians
were shot, and many more imprisoned, but there were no mass
repressions, no transfers of population to the gulags or to remote
parts of the Soviet empire, no attempts to wipe out whole sections
of the population.
Quite apart from the reluctance of the Soviet leadership to
carry out such a program, two things had occurred that nobody had
foreseen, both of which stemmed from the fact that Hungary has
a common border with Austria and with what was then West Ger-
many. One occurrence was that from the moment the Hungarian
Revolution broke out it became possible to enter Hungary quite
freely, with the result that this was the first event of its kind to be
covered in detail from the beginning by reporters, television cam-
eramen, and photographers from all over the world. Few historical
events, in fact, have ever produced more copy and pictures than the
Hungarian Revolution, and the pages of Life, Paris-Match, and
Stern (and their counterparts all over the world) brought the revo-
lution home to readers in searing and unforgettable images, none
of them likely to create goodwill for the Soviet Union.
The second was that the open frontiers with the West made
6 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
it possible for large numbers of Hungarians to leave once it was
clear that the revolution had failed—whole classes of people
whom Stalin would have had shot or sent to the gulags simply
walked across the frontier into Austria or West Germany, and
from there moved on to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the
United States. This Hungarian diaspora was not unlike the
flight of educated, upper-middle-class Cubans to Miami after
Castro seized power.
Hitherto, accounts of Soviet repression had been anecdotal,
and many people on the left didn’t believe them. The Chechens
had been shipped in cattle cars in midwinter to exile in Siberia
without their suffering having been recorded by photographers
for Life, by cameramen for the network news shows, or by best-
selling novelists; the gulags were out of sight (as well as, for most
people in the West, out of mind); the murder of millions of
kulaks during the collectivization process went undocumented;
in short, the worst of Stalin’s crimes had gone unseen and had
left almost no record. But Budapest was full of eyewitnesses,
and events there were on the nightly news and the front pages
in the West, impossible to ignore. Not only that; all this was,
from the point of view of the press, “great stuff ”: burning build-
ings; tanks blown up by heroic schoolchildren with Molotov
cocktails; weeping, wounded babies in the hospitals; students
fighting the Red Army in the streets. These events were per-
fectly calculated to make “news,” like something out of the pages
of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Here was everything Lord Copper
could have wanted—heroism in the streets, the release of an
imprisoned cardinal, the secret police shot down by angry civil-
ians, and beautiful girls cradling submachine guns.
The hapless Russians were caught in the full glare of the
Western news machine, blinking in the face of flashbulbs and
The Idol with Feet of Clay 7
growling with rage, like an adulterous husband caught in flagrante
delicto by the Fleet Street press corps. As if that were not bad
enough, the great numbers of Hungarians who escaped after the
revolution—and who were speedily settled in the West, to assuage
Westerners’ guilt for not having intervened in or supported the
revolution—kept the event alive in people’s imagination for many
years; so, unlike most news stories, this one did not fade quickly
from people’s minds. People had seen, with their own eyes, what
Soviet repression was like; it was not quickly forgotten on either
side of the Iron Curtain; and great sympathy was extended to those
who had survived and escaped it.
When Talleyrand was told the news of Napoleon’s execution
of the duke d’Enghien and asked what he thought of what was
then regarded by many people as a state crime, he replied, “It is
worse than a crime—it is a blunder.”
Much the same can be said of the Hungarian Revolution. It
was a blunder of historic proportions on the part of the Soviet
Union. The initial demands of the Hungarians could have been
met, perhaps not totally, but partially—certainly enough to
restore order. “Socialism with a human face,” as it was later called,
could have been put in place in Hungary and might have spread
to the rest of the Soviet Union’s eastern European empire, and
the Warsaw Pact could have been turned into a genuine alliance.
Instead, the governments of the people’s democracies, for their
own survival, were obliged to tighten the screws on their own
people. The mailed fist was henceforth the only official political
answer to any problem; and it became clear, even to those who
had not hitherto been willing to believe it, that the only way for-
ward to a better life would require the destruction of the whole
communist system, and the complete removal of Russian armed
forces from eastern Europe.
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10 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
An account of that event—undoubtedly a turning point in
the full meaning of the phrase—seems appropriate fifty years
after it occurred, when we can see, quite clearly, to borrow the
words of Winston Churchill, that while it was not the end, or
even the beginning of the end, it was, perhaps, the end of the
beginning. The uprising in Budapest in October 1956 marked
the first and most significant failure of the Soviet Union in its
hard-won role as the dominant power in eastern Europe, as well
as a monumental public failure in foreign relations (and public
relations) for the heirs of Stalin. After 1956, Soviet policy in
eastern Europe seesawed between timid attempts to soften the
grasp of the party and the police, and to allow each country a
little more freedom in terms of its own special historical institu-
tions and values—for example, not trying too hard to eliminate
private farming in Hungary, or turning a blind eye to the role of
the Catholic church in Poland—and halfhearted threats of force,
which achieved little except to keep alive the feeling among
eastern Europeans that the Soviet Union, communism, and the
Red Army were their enemies, and that their own governments
were merely collaborationists and traitors.
This feeling was exacerbated by the fact that from the point of
view of the Russians, the eastern Europeans, to paraphrase Harold
Macmillan, “never had it so good.” However grim, grimy, and
impoverished life might seem to Western visitors in Prague, East
Berlin, Budapest, or Warsaw, it was a good deal better than life in
Moscow or Leningrad, let alone in the more remote industrial
cities in the Soviet Union. The fact that agriculture had been only
halfheartedly collectivized in the eastern European countries led
to a greater abundance of food; besides, the eastern European
countries had not experienced the full horrors of Leninism and
Stalinism from 1917 on. Most of them still had a substantial edu-
The Idol with Feet of Clay 11
cated middle class, however much it was shorn of political rights
and property, and some tradition of bourgeois democracy. The
party might try to discourage religious belief, but the churches
had not been eradicated any more than the peasants had been
turned into kolkhozniki (collective farmers). From the Russian
point of view, the countries of eastern Europe had nothing to
complain about. This made it all the more irritating that they did
nothing but complain.
Worse, the increasing inability of the Soviet Union to hold
its satellite states down and impose orthodox Stalinist-Leninist
politics on them—the realization that nothing but brute force,
brutally applied, could prevent the Hungarians and the Czechs
from moving toward a free market economy; or the Poles from
going to church and forming independent labor unions; or the
East Germans from trying to escape to West Germany despite
the Wall; or the Romanians from hating the ruling Ceauşescu
family—eventually forced the Soviet Union to relax its hold on
eastern Europe. Even a world power could do only so many
things at once. The Russians were trapped in an extravagantly
expensive arms race with the United States; sponsoring revolu-
tions as far abroad as Central America and Africa; supporting a
host of Middle Eastern “clients”; attempting to suppress rebel-
lion in Georgia, Afghanistan, and most of their own southern
border republics; and competing with the increasingly obdurate
Chinese for leadership of the communist world. The Russians’
economy was hopelessly overcentralized; their industrial base,
except when it came to military production, was antiquated; agri-
cultural production was declining; and the Russians themselves,
in the dawning new age of satellite television and personal com-
puters, were for the first time exposed to the temptations of the
Western consumer economy—temptations which the planners
12 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
in the Politburo were unable to stifle or to satisfy. The Soviet
Union was thus in no position to use force in eastern Europe,
even had it wanted to; and as the Soviet army bogged down in
Afghanistan—the Russian equivalent of America’s involvement
in Vietnam—even confidence in the army began to wane. The
Soviet Union was not yet a paper tiger, but it was in the process
of becoming one, and its troops in the eastern European coun-
tries began to be pitied rather than feared.
It was Gorbachev’s great and fatal miscalculation to assume
that he could allow the eastern European countries to give up
communism yet still preserve it at home. In fact, the collapse of
communism in the Soviet Union’s client states inevitably led to
its swift disappearance in Russia as well. The system collapsed
like a house of cards, with a swiftness that astonished everyone.
The Hungarians had been the first to grasp that the idol had
feet of clay, and the first to try to destroy it—the toppling of
Stalin’s huge statue in Budapest in October 1956 was deeply
symbolic—but the Russians, having suppressed the Hungarian
Revolution, failed to learn a lesson from the experience. They
expanded their role as a world power—a nuclear superpower,
competing with the United States all over the world—without
trying to solve the problems (or, in Marxist terms, the “contra-
dictions”) in their own backyard; and eventually ferment and
dissent close to home fatally undercut the regime. It took
twenty-five years for the Hungarians to win the battle they had
begun (and lost) in October 1956, but in the end they did win.
As Russians said to each other, with bitter irony, in 1988, while
Soviet institutions collapsed around them, paraphrasing a favor-
ite communist slogan, “For seventy years we have been on the
road to nowhere.”
. . .
The Idol with Feet of Clay 13
This book will try to explain first of all how the Hungarian
Revolution came about, and, of necessity, to explain to the reader
how Hungary came to be in the position it was in as of 1956;
and then to trace the events of 1956 both as history and in terms
of my own experience there (which will likewise require a bit of
explanation).
Like most significant historical events, the Hungarian Revo-
lution did not take place by accident or in a vacuum; but neither
was it carefully planned, as the Russians wanted the world to
believe. In retrospect, of course, all things—or most of them—
are clear, but the various strands that brought the Hungarians
into armed conflict with the Soviet Union require a fairly patient
unraveling if they are to be understood. Some things can proba-
bly never be completely sorted out—the importance of Radio
Free Europe in encouraging the Hungarians to take up arms
and to believe that the United States would support them, for
example; or the involvement of the British government and
MI6 in goading the Hungarians to fight in order to tie up the
Soviet Union in the streets of Budapest while the United King-
dom, France, and Israel invaded Egypt—but I will do my best
to distinguish fantasy from reality.
Countermyths have grown up too, of course, some of which
were dreamed up by the KGB at the time of the uprising and have
taken root and flourished over the decades—that the Freedom
Fighters were right-wing anti-Semites, for instance; or that the
entire episode was the work of Western intelligence agencies, a
CIA plot from the start.
At the time, it looked on the contrary very much as if the
Western powers were trying to calm the situation down and
hold the Hungarians back, rather than supply them with weap-
ons or help of any kind, but appearances in such matters can be
14 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
deceiving. Certainly, the Hungarians were disappointed not to
receive any concrete help from the West—particularly from the
United States—and most better-educated Hungarians realized
that their revolution was doomed the moment they heard the
news of Suez, and were briefly embittered as a result against
Great Britain and France; but on the whole, feelings toward the
West still remained friendly even among Hungarians who felt
they had been betrayed. In any case, as with every revolution,
once it began it took on its own logic and moved at its own
pace—there was simply no way to stop it or slow it down, even
had anybody wanted to. It would end in victory or in defeat, and
that was that.
To understand how and why the revolution began, of course,
it is necessary to go farther back than 1956, or even 1945, when
the Red Army finally took Budapest after a long and bitter siege
and drove the German army out. Hungary lies on the border—
one might almost say the fault line—between East and West, and
always has. Settled by the descendants of Attila’s Hun followers
(hence “Hungary”), it eventually flourished as a Christian king-
dom; was defeated and occupied by the Turks; and was liberated,
only to become ruled from Vienna as a reluctant part of the
Hapsburg empire.
Given its history and its geography, Hungary always looked
toward the West and feared the East.
Hungary was a land of many brave, hopeless battles against
overwhelming odds, so it was perhaps not surprising that the
Hungarians took up battle against the Soviet Union at the
height of the cold war.
2.
Hungary: The Mythic Nation
and the Real One
In no country’s history is it ever easy to distinguish myth from
fact, but making that distinction is even harder than usual
when it comes to Hungary.
To begin with, there have always been several superimposed
Hungaries, each one quite different. First, of course, is the phys-
ical, geographical Hungary, a land of astonishing beauty and
richness—though here too there is some confusion, for Hun-
gary has grown and receded many times over the centuries, and
thanks to the Treaty of Trianon in 1919 much of the land that
Hungarians traditionally regard as theirs now lies in Romania,
Slovakia, Croatia, and Poland, along with the Hungarians who
still resentfully live there. It is hard for an American or a Briton
to understand how difficult history is for a small country with
no easily fixed or natural borders, with larger and much more
powerful neighbors to the east and west, and with exalted terri-
torial ambitions of its own against its smaller neighbors.
Second is the historical Hungary, a nation that is now 1,110
16 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
years old—as old, that is, as France. This Hungary was trans-
formed from a way station of nomadic, mounted Hunnish tribes
(inventors of the stirrup, beef jerky, and the wood-framed
leather-covered saddle) moving west in the wake of Attila into a
functioning monarchy under the leadership of Árpád. It strug-
gled for its existence during most of its tumultuous history,
eventually becoming the easternmost bastion of Catholicism
until it was conquered by the Turks in 1526. Hungary’s popula-
tion fell from 4 million to 1.5 million under Turkish rule—the
Turks were early practitioners of genocide—and Hungary was
finally liberated in 1686 only to be engulfed by the Hapsburg
empire, against which the Hungarians rebelled in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, with tragic consequences.
Third is the mythic Hungary, land of Gypsy music; dashing
horsemen; beautiful, hot-blooded women; paprika; rich, spicy
food; full-bodied wines; and Tokay.
Fourth is the Hungary of the diaspora—a nation with just
over 10 million inhabitants, plus almost 3 million living—
whether willingly or not—abroad.
The fourth Hungary has always commanded more attention
than the others, for Hungary’s greatest export has always been
people. A good example: in the eighteenth century Moric Beny-
ovszky, a Hungarian, fought with the Poles against Russia; was
taken prisoner and deported to Kamchatka, in easternmost
Siberia; managed to escape by seizing a Russian man-of-war
and sailing it around the world, stopping among other places at
Madagascar, which impressed him greatly; and then made his
way to France, where he persuaded King Louis XV to let him
establish a French colony in Madagascar. Louis XV, not an easy
man to persuade, eventually made Benyovszky a count and
allowed him to proceed, whereupon Benyovszky returned to
Hungary: The Mythic Nation and the Real One 17
Madagascar, defeated the local tribes, and in 1776 had himself
declared emperor of Madagascar—hardly what Louis XV had
in mind. He persuaded those of the inhabitants of Madagascar
who could read to adopt Latin script, with Hungarian spellings;
made a visit to Britain and the United States seeking support;
and was appointed a general by Empress Maria Theresa of Aus-
tria before losing his life in a coup staged against him by rival
French colonists.
Benyovszky set the pattern for many Hungarian expatriates
who followed him—one sees in him a fatal combination of cour-
age, optimism, imagination, restless talent, charm (after all, he
charmed both Louis XV and Maria Theresa, two supreme real-
ists), and unmistakable folie de grandeur which would soon become
only too familiar.
Benyovszky was not alone in his gift for charming the French
king and court. Count Laszlo Bercsenyi, a gifted eighteenth-
century cavalry officer, brought to France the idea of the
huszár—the Hungarian light cavalryman, with a characteristic
short, gold-laced, fur-trimmed, fur-lined cape thrown over one
shoulder; a high fur cap; skintight embroidered riding breeches;
and long, curved saber—thus changing the French cavalry, and
eventually the cavalry of all the great European nations, which
one after the other adopted the hussars as free-ranging light
cavalry. Light cavalry had a completely different role and set of
tactics from conventional heavy cavalry; the latter carried long
straight swords and wore thick thigh-high boots, heavy helmets,
and gleaming cuirasses. (It was the British light cavalry that
charged so disastrously at Balaklava in the Crimean War, a role
for which they were never intended. The heavy cavalry is still
represented by the Household Cavalry, whom tourists see on
mounted duty in London and at Windsor Palace.)
18 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
It must have taken a singular degree of charm—and what
would later come to be known as chutzpah—to persuade the
officers of what was then Europe’s most powerful army to accept
a major innovation in cavalry, always the most conservative of arms,
from a small country far away on the Danube; it is pleasant to
record that Bercsenyi came to a happier end than Benyovszky—
he was created a marshal of France, the only Hungarian to reach
the highest rank in the army of France.
History has always provided talented and ambitious Hungar-
ians with good reasons to leave Hungary and seek their fortune
abroad. In the eighteenth century Prince Rákóczi’s abortive
uprising against the Hapsburgs led many aristocratic Hungarians
to flee. A century later the failure of the revolution of 1848–
1849, which was crushed by the Austrians with help from the
Russians, led many educated Hungarian professional men, as well
as aristocrats, to leave.
There have been, in fact, five distinct periods of emigration:
that of the eighteenth century; that which followed the failed
rising of 1848–1849; a largely proletarian emigration to the
United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, due to
an economic crisis and disappointed expectations in the Hun-
garian working class; the emigration of the 1920s and the 1930s,
mostly of well-educated, assimilated, successful Hungarian Jews
who had the good sense to see that the fairly mild, institutional-
ized anti-Semitism of the Horthy government was likely to turn
into something far worse, as indeed it did after Hitler came to
power in 1933; and, finally, after the failed revolution of 1956,
the mass escape of several hundred thousand Hungarians who
left during the period when the borders were still open.
In each case a failed revolution or a political failure triggered
a massive emigration (in terms of Hungary’s relatively small
Hungary: The Mythic Nation and the Real One 19
population), but in each case it was a different class of people
who left. The Hungarian aristocrats who crowded the courts of
Europe in the eighteenth century were very different people
from the middle-class professional men and army officers who
emigrated after Kossuth’s revolution (many of the latter reached
high command in the Union army during the American Civil
War). The working-class families that emigrated to America
and settled in Ohio and Illinois to work in the coal mines and
steel mills were very different from the middle-class, assimilated
Jewish doctors, bankers, artists, film and theater people, journal-
ists, and writers who fled from Horthy and later from the threat
of Hitler’s influence over Horthy. In 1956 the refugees included
people of every social class who no longer wished to live under
communism, or, in a smaller number of cases, had taken too vis-
ible a role in the revolution to risk remaining in Hungary at the
mercy of the Hungarian or the Soviet secret police.
But Hungarian men of talent or genius had always emigrated,
even when politics was not the cause. Although Budapest was a
beautiful, sophisticated, cosmopolitan city, the capital of the
Austro-Hungarian empire was Vienna. The court was in Vienna,
as was the German-language press, and with it the possibility
that one’s fame might spread to the greater world beyond—to
Paris or, later, Berlin. Hungary was small; its language was
impenetrable. Eventually, with whatever regrets, it was difficult
to resist taking the road that led to Vienna, and from there to the
other capitals of Europe. The great Hungarian pianist and com-
poser Franz Liszt took that path, and he was neither the first nor
the last. Liszt found fame, but like many emigrants he always
looked homeward with nostalgia. All Hungarians did. Easily
assimilated as they were (Benyovszky spoke fluent German,
French, Polish, English, and Russian, and was made a count by
20 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
the Poles, by Louis XV, and by Maria Theresa—who also made
him a general—before persuading the Madagascar tribes to
declare him emperor), the Hungarians never lost their nostalgia
for Hungary.
This nostalgic Hungary—a colorful folkloric land of wailing
Gypsy violins; spicy goulash; frothy desserts; and great estates
where exotically dressed aristocrats still hunted bison, wolves, and
bear—became, thanks to generations of Hungarian emigrants, more
or less fixed in people’s minds. In much the same way, millions of
emigrants from Ireland eventually succeeded in imprinting in
people’s minds a mythic Ireland of lush green fields, leprechauns,
shamrocks, and smiling colleens that bore scant resemblance to
the land from which they had fled to escape starvation, poverty,
fratricidal politics, religious persecution, and 900 years of English
occupation.
Perhaps fortunately, Hungary has no equivalent of the green
plastic bowler hats and buttons that read “Kiss me, I’m Irish!”
worn on St. Patrick’s Day even by people who haven’t a drop of
Irish blood; but like Ireland, the mythic Hungary came to have
a weightier significance in people’s minds than the real one.
People who couldn’t name the capital of Hungary knew all
about Transylvania, with its towering mountains and its packs
of wolves wailing in the moonlight outside the sinister castle of
Count Dracula—even though, thanks to the Treaty of Trianon,
the vampire count, like so many more ordinary Hungarians,
eventually found himself living in Romania.
The fact that Hungary in the twentieth century was a real
country, with growing heavy industry, mines, and a rich base of
agriculture, as well as numerous bitter grievances against its
neighbors and insoluble internal political problems, passed
almost unnoticed in the greater world. In part this was because
Hungary: The Mythic Nation and the Real One 21
there was a certain undeniable comic-opera quality to Hunga-
ry’s situation: although Hungary is a landlocked country, it was
ruled from 1919 almost to the end of World War II by an admi-
ral. The national reputation for charm extended to producing a
portrait of Hungary as a charming place, and playing down such
problems as the fact that the Horthy regime was a dictatorship,
or that it tolerated and even encouraged a high level of anti-
Semitism. Even Jewish émigrés in the 1920s and 1930s contin-
ued to talk about Hungary with tears in their eyes, and seldom
mentioned the reason they had fled abroad in the first place.
Hungarians were adaptable; they had a natural ability for lan-
guages (hardly anybody but themselves in the Austro-Hungar-
ian empire spoke Hungarian, so they were obliged to learn
German if they wanted to get ahead); and they benefited from
the one thing at which the Austro-Hungarian empire excelled—
a first-class educational system. No small country had better
schools, gymnasia (high schools), universities, and technical
schools than Hungary; and for a country with a population of
only 10 million, Hungary also had a remarkably intense artistic
and intellectual life.
To take an example from my own family, my father, Vincent
Korda, was the youngest of the three sons of a Jewish estate
manager who died early, leaving his family impoverished. Never-
theless, Vincent went to a demanding secondary school and
gymnasium in the provincial town of Kecskemét, where his talent
as an artist was quickly noticed; and went on from there to
attend the Academy of Applied Arts on a scholarship, and to
take classes at the Artists’ House in Budapest in 1914–1915.
After service on the Transylvanian front in the war, he returned
to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, and he became
a member of the famous artists’ colony of Nagybánya, before
22 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
leaving Horthy’s Hungary to study in Italy and in Paris. Though
Vincent was poor—he worked as a bricklayer and a scenery
painter at the opera to support himself—and Jewish, his educa-
tion as an artist was paid for by the state; and except for Paris,
Hungary then offered perhaps the most advanced and intensive
training for artists in all of Europe. Nor was Hungary backward
or conservative—avant-garde work was part of the curriculum,
and many of the teachers would be among the most famous
modern painters of the period between the wars. The same was
true for medicine, mathematics, physics, architecture, and chem-
istry—Hungary produced vastly more educated young people
than it could possibly afford to use or employ, particularly after
the Allies stripped it of nearly two-thirds of its territory; and
since a significant number of these young people were Jewish,
they had two good reasons for taking the road to Vienna and
beyond.
Hungary also produced more directors, film people, play-
wrights, photographers, and left-wing journalists than were
needed (or desired by the Horthy regime); and they too left to
seek their fortune in Paris, London, New York, and Hollywood,
where it was soon said, “It is not enough to be a Hungarian; you
must also work.”
The expatriate Hungarian became, in fact, a mythic figure,
particularly in show business, and appeared in a whole series of
jokes: “The Hungarian recipe for an omelet begins, ‘First steal a
dozen eggs.’ ” “A Hungarian is a man who walks into a revolv-
ing door after you and comes out ahead of you.” The Hungarian
as a shrewd, cunning, and charming émigré became a stock fig-
ure, and this image almost obscured the number of Hungarians
abroad who didn’t become rich and famous, and the number of
Hungarians in Hungary who suffered from a woefully feudal
Hungary: The Mythic Nation and the Real One 23
rural life and a government that was unapologetically hostile to
trade unions and “socialist” ideas about industry. When my
uncle Alex—the cosmopolitan movie producer and director Sir
Alexander Korda—accepted the first Academy Award ever given
for a foreign film (The Private Life of Henry VIII ) in 1933, he
began by saying, “My parents were born poor—but Hungarian!”
The audience members roared with laughter because they
understood exactly what he meant. To be Hungarian in the
world outside the Danube basin was to be, in the eyes of many,
a member of a talented and privileged group, so much so that
when the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Enrico Fermi was
asked if he believed in extraterrestrial beings, he replied, “They
are already here—they are called Hungarians!”
This feeling was so widespread that the Hungarians began
to lay claim to a truly extraordinary range of historical figures
whose genealogy included Hungarian blood, however remote or
far back. The Hungarian-American Association, for example,
gives as its prize for achievement a bronze medal bearing the
likeness of George Washington, who turns out to have had sev-
eral remote ancestors who were Hungarian, and is therefore “of
Hungarian descent.”* More than any other ethnic group, Hungar-
ians took pride in listing famous people who were Hungarian,
or of Hungarian descent, however remotely, including endless
Civil War generals, Nobel Prize winners, table tennis champions,
and inventors.
A glance at a recent list of examples of “Hungarian genius”
includes, among hundreds of others, the composers Béla Bartók
and Zoltán Kodály; the photographers Robert Capa, Brassaï,
Martin Munkacszi, and André Kertész; Jozsef Biro, the inventor
*I myself was awarded this medal in 1989.
24 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
of the ballpoint pen; the business tycoons Andy Grove and
George Soros; the Lauder cosmetics family; the magician Harry
Houdini; the actors Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi, Ernie Kovacs,
Leslie Howard, Paul Lukacs, Tony Curtis, and Paul Newman;
the actresses Goldie Hawn, Mitzi Gaynor, Jamie Lee Curtis,
and the Gabor sisters; the writers Ferenc Molnár, Elie Wiesel,
and Arthur Koestler; the nuclear physicists Edward Teller and
Leo Szilard; the journalists Joseph Pulitzer, J. Anthony Lukas,
and Kati Marton; the comedian Jerry Seinfeld; the rock musi-
cian Paul Simon; athletes ranging from Martina Hingis and
Monica Seles to Johnny Weissmuller and Joe Namath; the
inventor of Rubik’s Cube; the African explorer Count Samuel
Teleki; Sandor Korosi Csoma (“who walked from Hungary to
Tibet, presented the world with the first Tibetan dictionary, and
became a Buddhist saint”); the film directors George Cukor,
Michael Curtiz, and my uncles Zoltán Korda and Sir Alexander
Korda; the clothing designer and entrepreneur Calvin Klein;
the architect Lázsló Moholy-Nagy; the mathematicians John
von Neumann and Peter Lax; Colonel Agoston Haraszthy, who
founded the California wine industry; Max Kiss, who invented
Ex-Lax; Charles Fleischmann (of the Fleischmann’s Yeast for-
tune); and Henrietta Szold, who founded Hadassah—not to
speak of my father and myself.
Whether Paul Newman, Goldie Hawn, and Jamie Lee Curtis
regard themselves as examples of Hungarian genius is hard to
say; but it is certain that Hungarians have reached out to claim
many of the world’s more celebrated people as their own, and that
many famous people whose names are not in the least Hungar-
ian proudly claim a Hungarian ancestor on one side of the family
or the other. This process did not begin with the period of emi-
gration after World War I and did not end there—Hungarians
Hungary: The Mythic Nation and the Real One 25
were doing it as early as the eighteenth century, when Hungarian
émigrés tended to be aristocratic adventurers seeking their fortune
in the courts of Europe; and in the mid-nineteenth century, when
many Hungarians seeking a better life in the New World after
the failure of the revolution of 1848–1849 laid claim to aristo-
cratic ancestry and titles that were often imaginary.
To be a Hungarian emigrant is, and has always been, to
embark on an adventure; and many Hungarian success stories
tend to resemble the plot of a picaresque novel, though Csoma
is perhaps the only one to have achieved Buddhist sainthood.
As a result of this process, people have always looked kindly
on Hungary, remote as it seemed. The emigrants who left after
1848–1849 were treated as heroes all over the world; and Kossuth
himself, the leader of the revolution, was widely admired by
everybody, including Queen Victoria, who was not normally an
admirer of revolutionaries. This admiration for Hungary—at
any rate for Hungary as it was remembered by Hungarians who
lived elsewhere—continued throughout the nineteenth century
and the early twentieth century. It lapsed briefly in 1918, when
the victorious Allied powers took note of the promises they had
made to the Czechs, the Romanians, the Serbs, and the Poles
during World War I and came to the realization that these
claims could be met only at the expense of Hungary, which, as
part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, had the bad luck to be on
the losing side of the war. This led to the wholesale dismember-
ment of Hungary; but once that was accomplished, as if by a
miracle, the country made its way rapidly back into the good
graces of the world.
The Hungarians (with concealed help from the Allies) had
overthrown the communist government of Béla Kun (whom
Admiral Horthy, with instinctive anti-Semitism, always referred
26 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
to as “Béla Cohn”) by means of a right-wing putsch, and were
eager to do business with their former wartime enemies Britain,
France, and the United States. Here was at least one small coun-
try where communists, and even socialists, were thrown into jail;
where there was no nonsense about trade unions or an eight-
hour workday; and where the exchange rate was protected by an
authoritarian government that smiled on bankers and industri-
alists, provided they were not Jewish. As if to make up for having
amputated much of Hungary’s territory (and stranded 1 million
Hungarians in hostile countries), the Western powers sent in
floods of investment, making Hungary prosperous and burnish-
ing Budapest’s reputation as the Paris of eastern Europe.
Despite the exodus of much of its intelligentsia, and its scien-
tific and artistic elite, Hungary, though a fascist country, continued
to enjoy a remarkably good press. The Hungarians had paid
their debts—or the debts of the Allies—to those of their neigh-
bors who had joined the Allied cause; had rid themselves of a
communist dictatorship; and were open for profitable business.
Their government enjoyed, among the wealthy and the well con-
nected, a Ruritanian reputation, which it did not deserve but
which it worked hard to preserve. Even those who had fled—
some in well-justified terror—from the anti-Semitic excesses of
Horthy’s less cultured supporters nevertheless continued to
speak well of Hungary once they reached safety, unlike those
who would later flee from Germany in 1933, when Hitler came
to power; or in 1938, when he seized Austria.
Hungarians abroad might not speak with one voice—that
was hardly possible, given their diversity—but they showed a
marked disinclination to criticize their own country. This would
play a role in the tragedy to come, for the Russians could hardly
have picked a country that seemed to most western Europeans
Hungary: The Mythic Nation and the Real One 27
and Americans more harmless and familiar than Hungary to
turn into a Stalinist nightmare. Never mind that Hungary had
been on the wrong side in two world wars; Hungary seemed, to
most people who thought about it at all, part of the West; Hun-
garians were visible everywhere as celebrities, Nobel laureates,
scientists, artists, and filmmakers; and the deliberate (and fraud-
ulent) coup that placed Hungary behind the Iron Curtain and
under the thumb of a Stalinist government and its secret police
seemed, therefore, a more than usually cynical and brutal exam-
ple of Soviet policy.
This sympathy for the Hungarians intensified throughout
the early years of the cold war, and managed to wipe out, in the
minds of most people in the West, the fact that Hungary had
fought, with whatever reluctance, on the side of Nazi Germany.
The fact that the Hungarians had a worldwide reputation
for being vivacious, gay, creative, charming, and talented merely
made it seem to most people all the more sad that they were
now trapped behind the Iron Curtain, under the leadership of
authoritarian thugs and a Soviet military occupation—victims,
apparently in perpetuity, of the cold war.
3.
Hungary and the Cold War
The Hungarians are behaving like Poles.
The Poles are behaving like Czechs. And
the Czechs are behaving like bastards.
—Hungarian joke during the Revolution of 1956
T he cold war is a remote memory now, and its early years, in
the 1950s, are even more so.
To those of us who grew up during World War II, the cold
war never seemed altogether real—for those of us who were Brit-
ish, “the enemy” was forever fixed in our minds as the Germans,
who were even then, confusingly, in the process of becoming our
allies in the cold war, and whose cars we already admired and
coveted. That the Russians were a threat was certainly clear
enough; and that they had penetrated farther into Europe than
was good for us, or for them, was easy enough to see, even on the
more up-to-date maps, on which the “Iron Curtain,” to quote
Churchill’s masterly phrase, was clearly marked with a thick red
line. But the Americans took that threat more seriously than
most western Europeans—or than the British, who at that time
did not yet feel themselves to be Europeans at all.
Hungary and the Cold War 29
When my uncle the film producer Sir Alexander Korda mar-
ried, for the third (and last) time, a beautiful and much younger
woman, he bought a house in Kensington Palace Gardens, then
as now known as Millionaires’ Row, where the embassy of the
Soviet Union was inappropriately located. Alex, a truly cosmo-
politan man, was always happy to attend cocktail parties at the
Soviet embassy, next door to his own house, though he had no
sympathy for communism, having experienced it firsthand in
Budapest, in 1919, when Béla Kun briefly held power and
imposed a communist government on Hungary—which became,
briefly, the only western European communist country, to Lenin’s
surprise and dismay.
During World War II, the Russians had been great fans of
Alex’s pictures. Winston Churchill had taken a print of That
Hamilton Woman, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, to
Moscow and shown it to Stalin, who had been deeply impressed;
and for years it was the only British movie to play in the Soviet
Union, where it was hugely popular, although, of course, no roy-
alty payments were forthcoming. Alex was informed from time to
time that large amounts of money were available to him in the
Soviet Union should he care to come and spend it there, but he
had no desire to see Moscow or spend his blocked rubles there,
and was content to limit his excursions on Soviet soil to the
embassy, where there was an inexhaustible supply of the very best
beluga caviar and chilled vodka for a VIP guest like himself.
My aunt Alexa and I often accompanied him to these events.
Alexa was a young Canadian woman of Ukrainian descent, and
with her high cheekbones, her long blond hair done up in a
French twist, and her almond-shaped gray-blue eyes (a touch of
Tartar or Kalmuck blood there, perhaps, Alex often teased her,
to her great annoyance), she resembled a thinner and more svelte
30 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
version of the happy collective farmers harvesting wheat who
figured in many of the huge socialist realist paintings hung in
the embassy—that is, if one could imagine the kolkhoz girls
dressed by Balenciaga or Dior, and wearing, say, 200,000 pounds
worth of diamonds.
Perhaps because of this, Alexa was much admired by the
Russian diplomats. They tended, in those days, to appear almost
square—short, broad-shouldered men in baggy gray suits with
preposterously wide trousers. They had many gold teeth that
they displayed when they smiled, and eyes that hardly smiled at
all. They were, after all, hardened communist bureaucrats from a
world in which a sense of humor, hand kissing, and a gift for
bourgeois charm were not necessarily assets. The contrast
between them and their embassy itself was striking—they stood,
in their cheap suits and thick-soled Czech shoes, under vast,
glittering crystal chandeliers, surrounded by crimson damask
walls, gilded carved wood, and monumental marble staircases;
behind them was a long buffet table covered by a starched white
tablecloth, with whole sturgeons on gilded platters, mountains
of caviar in ice carvings of the Kremlin Palace, Georgian cham-
pagne in silver coolers, masses of flowers, and many crossed
British and Soviet flags.
Many unavoidable toasts were offered in vodka to the friend-
ship of our two nations, and one usually left the embassy with
the beginning of a bad headache. I remember the three of us
descending the wide white marble steps of the embassy into the
graveled courtyard in the early hours of the evening after one
such party, as Alex’s black Rolls-Royce pulled up (his house was
less than 100 yards away, but he considered it an obligation to his
belief in capitalism to arrive at the Soviet embassy in a chauffeur-
driven Rolls). As we settled into the car—Alex in front next to
Hungary and the Cold War 31
his chauffeur, Bailey; Alexa and myself in back—Alex lit a cigar
and sighed. “If that’s the world of the future,” he said, “I don’t
want to live to see it. But you know what they all say now. The
optimists in the West are learning Russian. The pessimists are
learning Chinese.”
In the Royal Air Force, which I was shortly to join—two
years of military service was compulsory in those days—the same
thought had apparently occurred to the chief of the air staff. The
British armed forces had discovered themselves to be almost
completely without Russian interpreters and translators at the
beginning of the cold war; and now that the Russians had dis-
placed the Germans as the enemy, a joint services task force had
been created to force-feed Russian to selected recruits. As some-
body who had been educated in Switzerland, knew French and
German, and would be going to Oxford on the completion of
my military service to study modern languages, I was a natural
choice for learning Russian—my name had been placed on
the list before I had even packed my bag to take the train up to
R.A.F. Padgate, outside Liverpool, and begin my training as a
recruit.
In those days, foreign languages still did not come easily, or
willingly, to the British. In the British army, Edward Spears had
vaulted to high rank and influence in 1914 simply by virtue of
what seemed to his contemporaries an astonishing accomplish-
ment: being able to speak fluent French (or at least French that
seemed fluent to his fellow Englishmen). This miraculous ability
brought him to the rank of general in World War II as Churchill’s
liaison to the Free French. And this, after all, was the language of
our closest ally! Of course before and between the wars British
officers commonly learned Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Arabic, Swahili—
whatever languages were necessary to govern the empire—but
32 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
when it came to the languages of Europe (including France) the
general opinion was that all you needed to do to make yourself
understood was speak English very slowly and very, very loudly.
The possibility that this might not be the case with the Rus-
sians led to the creation of the Joint Services School for Lan-
guages in, of all places, Bodmin, Cornwall, to which I was posted
as soon as I finished recruit training. There we were woken every
morning by Russian marches played on the loudspeaker; were
forbidden to speak anything but Russian; performed Russian
infantry drill; and in general lived, breathed, and slept Russian.
The object, we were informed, was, improbably, to “enable us to
pass as Russians” by the completion of the course. To the best of
my knowledge, this never happened. Here, however, among the
low hills covered with gorse, the pouring rains, and the infinite
boredom of Bodmin on a Sunday afternoon, it gradually dawned
on us that the cold war was real, and that we were going to play
a part in it. Most of our instructors were Russian defectors from
communism of one kind or another (including one singularly
beautiful young Russian woman, Mrs. Svetlova, married to
another instructor, about whom the entire student body, as one
man, fantasized every night)—a clutch of mournful Slavs cut
adrift in alien Cornwall, within a stone’s throw of Jamaica Inn,
and determined that we should learn to sing “Bublichki” in chorus
and recite Pushkin’s poems.
More to the point, what we were doing was top secret—we
were forbidden to talk about it to anyone, and our futures were
being determined not just by the senior officers of our services
but by the occasional mysterious, shadowy visitors in civilian
clothes from MI5 (British counterintelligence) or the even more
shadowy and mysterious visitors from MI6 (British espionage,
the elusive secret service). The people from MI5 looked like
Hungary and the Cold War 33
policemen or army officers in civvies, with spit-polished toe
caps and regimental ties; those from MI6 were distinctly more
upper-class, better-tailored types, wearing the ties of the better
public schools or of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. There
hovered around MI6 a glamour that Ian Fleming and John le
Carré were later to exploit in fiction: in those innocent days,
before the defection of Kim Philby, nobody imagined that MI6
was compromised by old-school-tie traitors.
Needless to say, with my natural ability to mimic knowledge
of other languages, I did well at Bodmin. It was just like being
back in boarding school again, except that I was in uniform and
our school was surrounded by barbed wire and had sentries at
the gates. I could recite Pushkin’s love poems feelingly, and with
a perfect accent, to the beautiful Mrs. Svetlova (to no great
effect, I regret to say, which was perhaps just as well, since her
husband was built like a rugby forward and had been, among
other things, a boxing coach in the Red Army), though it was
hard to see how the ability to recite Russian poetry would help
us win the cold war. Indeed, the joint services—the Royal Navy,
the Army, the Royal Marines, and the Royal Air Force—had
foreseen this problem. Just in case a knowledge of Russian
poetry and folk songs might not prove sufficient to deter the
Soviet army from pouring through the Fulda gap into West
Germany with a million men, 10,000 tanks, and tactical nuclear
weapons, the joint services had provided a formidable regimental
sergeant-major of the Irish Guards to keep us up to scratch on
the parade ground, and to lead us on night exercises with hel-
met, full pack, and rifle on Bodmin Moor, where the uncharted
bogs frequently swallowed cattle, sheep, and careless drunks
taking a shortcut home; or to make us sit in a classroom blind-
folded, to strip and reassemble a Bren gun against the clock.
34 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
The Russians were coming, we were told again and again—it
was a question not of “if ” but of “when”—and it was our job to
stop them.
Naturally, we were expected to stop them by our ability to
translate and interpret Russian—intelligence work, in short—
and doubtless only in the last resort would we be expected to
stop them with rifle, bayonet, and Bren gun; in the meantime
we were left in no doubt that Armageddon was at hand, and
that we would have a role to play in it.
Toward the end of my posting to Bodmin I was interviewed
by a man in well-tailored tweeds of the kind one might wear for
a weekend in the country, an Old Harrovian tie, and suede
shoes, who remarked that in addition to Russian my knowledge
of Hungarian might turn out to be a bloody useful thing. I
pointed out that despite my Hungarian name, I didn’t speak a
word of Hungarian and knew next to nothing about Hungary.
He raised an eyebrow. “Well, it says here that you’re proficient
in Russian,” he said, examining my records. “It’s all the same
thing, surely?”
Not at all, I explained patiently. Russians were Slavs; their
language was Slavonic, distantly related to Polish, Czech, Serbo-
Croat, Ukrainian, and so on. But Hungarians were descended
from the Mongol followers of Attila the Hun, the Hungarian
national hero; Slavs of every and any kind were their natural
enemies and they spoke a language that was part of what is
called the Finno-Ugric group, comprising Finnish, Hungarian,
and Turkish, the only non-Indo-European languages in Europe.
While national stereotypes are seldom reliable, ethnic Russians
tend to be blond, snub-nosed, and pale-skinned, whereas the
Magyar national type is high-cheekboned, hawk-nosed, and
dark. Proficiency in Russian would not help me in the slightest
Hungary and the Cold War 35
in learning Hungarian, which is in any case one of the world’s
more difficult and impenetrable languages.
“I see,” he said, eyes glazing, and dismissed me with a languid
wave of the hand. I was conscious of having failed some sort of
test, and as I passed his desk I saw that he had written in his
black leather notebook, in a neat hand with his fountain pen,
“Difficult!” and underlined it twice. I had no doubt that the
comment referred to me, not to the Hungarian language, and
needless to say whatever secret job having to do with Hungary I
was being considered for never materialized.
Instead, I went on to take the R.A.F.’s course for wireless
operators; and once I sewed my “sparks” badge up, I was posted
to a former Luftwaffe base just outside Hamburg. From there,
in conditions of strict secrecy, we flew, by night, in former USAF
Super Flying Fortress B-50 bombers (rechristened “Washing-
tons” by the R.A.F.), up and down the border that separated
West Germany and East Germany, provoking the Soviet fighter
squadrons to scramble, while we recorded their call signs and
tried to identify and place each squadron.
It was tedious work, but since the Russians reacted to our
approach like a swarm of bees, there was always the distinct pos-
sibility of being shot down by a MIG to keep one on one’s toes.
It’s hard to doze when you can hear in your earphones half a
dozen eager night fighter pilots shouting at each other in Rus-
sian, only a mile or so away, particularly when one of them says,
“Yurik-one, this is Yurik-four, I see the exhausts of the stinking
son of a bitch, have I permission to fire?”
Fortunately, the Russians had no more wish to create a lethal
aerial border incident than we did, though there were many
close calls. On the other hand, our presence in the skies above
the border certainly interested them, beyond merely giving their
36 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
fighter pilots something to do. On one occasion at a nightclub
in Hamburg I was surprised when a very attractive woman (of a
German type resembling Marlene Dietrich in her early days in
Hollywood; or, more recently, Ute Lemper, the cabaret singer at
the Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel in New York) sat down
at my table and spoke to me in Russian. Since I had been staring
at her all evening, I was gratified, but also alarmed. I was not in
uniform, and there was no reason why she should have supposed
I spoke Russian. Much as I wanted to get to know her better,
the thought crossed my mind that she might be a Russian agent,
or, even worse, a British agente provocateure (in every sense of the
phrase) testing my loyalty on behalf of MI5 or the Royal Air
Force police. Both thoughts put a damper on any possibility of a
romantic encounter, and I did my best to pretend that I didn’t
understand a word of Russian. She then tried again, this time in
Hungarian.
That got my attention! Reporting the incident brought me
back into contact with MI5, where it was suggested that I might
want to pursue the relationship, which they could then monitor;
but although this was long before I had read le Carré, it was
clear to me that I would be involving myself in a spiderweb of
trouble, and that sitting in a four-engine bomber at 25,000 feet
while Soviet pilots argued about shooting me down was proba-
bly a good deal safer.
On the other hand, the notion that the KGB knew who I
was and what I was doing, assumed that I spoke Hungarian, was
aware that I knew Russian, and had figured out that I might
have a soft spot for blonds with high cheekbones gave me pause,
and brought home the reality of the cold war. We (the British)
might take it casually (and make fun of the Americans for tak-
ing it too seriously), but here, on the ground, in Germany, the
Hungary and the Cold War 37
cold war took on a whole new meaning. The Russians, certainly,
took it very seriously indeed; the Iron Curtain was real; and
Soviet-occupied eastern Europe was only a couple of hours away
by autobahn from the fleshpots of Hamburg.
The East might be mysterious, but it was never distant.
East Germany (formally, the Deutsche Demokratische Repub-
lik, DDR, though not yet recognized as such by the West),
Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, Yugoslavia,
Romania, Bulgaria, and even godforsaken Albania were, in those
days, all effectively organized as one-party “people’s states,” con-
trolled by the communist party and the secret police, and pursu-
ing, with varying degrees of success and speed, the elimination
of private ownership, the collectivization of agriculture, a strict
Marxist-Leninist educational system, complete communist
control of the media and censorship of the arts, the dictatorship
of the proletariat, the persecution of religion, and unquestioning
subservience to the Soviet Union in both domestic and foreign
policy.
Each country was led by a kind of homegrown clone of Sta-
lin. Most of these leaders were bullet-headed, heavyset, jowly,
scowling authority figures, toughened survivors of Stalin’s
purges, in front of whom thousands of schoolchildren paraded
on national holidays, bearing their leader’s portrait, singing his
praises, and performing folk dances, followed, for emphasis, by
hundreds of tanks. Those not old enough to remember all this
need only look at pictures of North Korea today, except that
Tiranë, Bucharest, East Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, and
Warsaw were less colorful and eccentric.
Until his death in 1953, the literal worship of Stalin (sym-
bolized by innumerable huge, brooding statues of him in every
38 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
shabby, dreary eastern European city) and the need to follow the
party line unthinkingly on every subject, however trivial, were
strictly enforced by terror, torture, rigged show trials, and the
swift execution of those who failed to abase themselves or
change their opinions quickly enough. Even after Stalin was
gone, his system lumbered on unchanged in the Soviet satellite
countries, despite the beginnings of a thaw in the Soviet Union
itself. Stalin’s gray, pudgy successors, Malenkov, Bulganin,
Molotov, and Khrushchev, might find it necessary to repudiate
him, cautiously at first, as if he might return from his glass coffin
at any moment and have them shot, and to promise “reform”—
to allow, as they say in Russian, “a little steam to escape the
pot”—but they were not so foolish as to abandon Stalinist
methods in the Soviet satellites. Lift the lid off the pot a little in
Hungary or Poland, and who could say if you could ever put it
back on again?
Apologists for the Soviet Union—of whom there was never
a shortage, even among those of us busily spying on its borders—
professed to admire its ideal of a classless society, its determina-
tion to put socialism into practice, and its sacrifices in World
War II; very few people, even the most reactionary of conserva-
tives, actually disliked the Russian people as the Germans had
been disliked (for good reason) and by many still were.
All the same, on the other side of the heavily guarded fron-
tier that separated the two Germanies, it was clear that there
was a world very different from ours: one of forced confessions
under torture for what seemed to be, in Western terms, minor or
incomprehensible differences of political opinion or Marxist
theory; one in which half the population seemed to be spying
on the other half; and one in which a semblance of unanimity
was rigorously maintained by huge parades, falsified statistics,
Hungary and the Cold War 39
the omniscient secret police, and a ruthless show of military
power, all of it bringing to mind George Orwell’s famous line,
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on
a human face forever.”
That the Russians had brought this on themselves by
embracing Marxist-Leninism and the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat was unfortunate for them, of course, though no doubt
their own business. But that they had inflicted their political
system brutally in eastern Europe, in their part of Germany, and
in the Balkans—and maintained communist rule there, in the
final analysis, by the overwhelming presence of Soviet occupa-
tion troops and the undisguised threat of using these troops to
put down any nationalist or anticommunist uprising—was a
different and more dangerous matter. Stifling people’s natural
desire for independence, freedom, and a decent standard of liv-
ing is always a risky business.
Countries such as Hungary and Poland had long histories
(and even longer memories) and had always thought of them-
selves as part of western Europe; even Czechoslovakia, created
from the debris of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire
in 1918, was essentially Western—Prague, after all, had once
been the capital of the Holy Roman empire, at the time of the
early Hapsburgs.
These countries may have had little in common with each
other, but in religion they were predominantly Catholic (with
the exception of the Protestant Czechs); they all used the Roman
rather than the Cyrillic alphabet; and they had always looked
westward toward Vienna, Paris, or London for ideas, fashions,
and trade—never eastward toward Moscow.
Russia, on the contrary, even for Slavic peoples like the Poles
and the Czechs, let alone militant non-Slavs like the Hungarians,
40 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
had for centuries been regarded as the home of repression,
authoritarianism, and backwardness, a vast landmass of misery,
poverty, and ignorance, ruled by a succession of autocratic czars
with a fierce appetite for other people’s lands, who rejected every
modern idea, including, but not limited to, nationalism, republi-
canism, democracy, the independence of small nations, freedom
of the press and the arts, parliamentary government, the rights
of man, and almost every other European idea since the Enlight-
enment and the French Revolution.
Russia, even in the early twentieth century, was a country in
which the ideas expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declara-
tion of Independence would have seemed deeply subversive, and
in which the balance between king and Parliament achieved by
the English in the seventeenth century still appeared to the czar
revolutionary and dangerous nonsense. Come to that, much of
what King John was forced to agree to by his barons at Runny-
mede in the Magna Carta would probably have appeared totally
unacceptable to Nicholas II, had he ever thought to read that
document. Nicholas had a great contempt for the tame accep-
tance by the British royal family of parliamentary government
and for the very idea of a constitutional monarchy. This con-
tempt was amply returned by Queen Victoria, Edward VII, and
George V, all of whom, though related to the Russian royal
family by numerous marriages, were deeply suspicious
of the czars’ reactionary political views and their concept of
themselves as autocrats, as well as by czarist designs on Afghan-
istan and India. For his part, the czar summed up his feelings,
neatly combining two prejudices, by remarking, “All English-
men are Yids.”
To Americans, the cold war was about communism, but to
Europeans, even those who were anticommunist, it was, at least
Hungary and the Cold War 41
subliminally, about Russia as well. “Mother Russia” had always
been the enemy of progress; the czar had long been reviled as
the “hangman of Europe”; Russia under the czars, whenever it
had advanced westward into Europe, had crushed whatever
freedom it found and had brought with it the apparatus of Rus-
sian absolutism: Cossacks, the knout, censorship, and rule by
the army and the police.
Most of Europe had direct experience at one time or another
of Russia’s presence, in the form of an invading Russian army,
even when it was ostensibly an army of liberation. In the early
nineteenth century, after the defeat of Napoleon, a Russian army
actually reached as far west as Paris, and the impatient call of
Russian officers to have their food served to them faster (Bystro!
Bystro! )—like the varied cold hors d’ouevres with which Rus-
sians usually began a meal or of which they sometimes made a
whole meal, instead of waiting for it to be cooked from scratch—
passed into the French language in the form of bistro, meaning
a restaurant that served prepared food from a fixed menu so that
you didn’t have to wait an hour or so for your meal. Culinary
innovations apart, those European countries that had experi-
enced the passage of a Russian army had no wish to see the
Russians come back again, and the closer they were to Russia
itself, the more strongly they felt about that.
Except among European communists, an embattled minor-
ity from 1933 to 1945, Russian rule would have been just as
unacceptable under the czars as it was under Stalin—indeed the
only difference was that in the form of a communist state Rus-
sia was more efficient at repression than it had been under the
czars, and that it found in every country a certain number of
left-wing sympathizers and collaborators. Communism, after
all, aspired to be a world movement and appealed to idealism;
42 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
that had never been the case with czarism. There were commu-
nists throughout Europe, not to speak of the United States and
Britain; and in every country there were a certain number of
people who were sympathetic toward communism without nec-
essarily being party members. By contrast, czarism had been
universally feared and despised everywhere outside Russia, even
by dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries (and also by a great many
people in Russia, of course). Nobody in any country except Rus-
sia had ever wanted to be ruled by the czars; but at least some
people in most countries wanted to live under communism,
though not necessarily in the form of a Russian occupation.
The Hungarians felt even more strongly about this than the
Poles. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Poles’ attempts at
independence (most of what is now Poland was then a part of
the Russian empire, and the rest of Poland had belonged since
the eighteenth century to the Austro-Hungarian empire and
Prussia) had been crushed with a savagery that shocked western
Europe, and sent a whole generation of aristocratic Poles into
exile. Indeed, the Russian general who crushed the rebellion of
1862 in Warsaw (and sent the czar an infamous telegram that
read, “Order reigns once again in Warsaw”) was portrayed even
in conservative European newspapers as a jackbooted monster
strutting over acres of devastated buildings and the piteous
corpses of slaughtered women and children, a sword dripping
with blood in his hand.
Hungary’s experience at the hands of the Russians had been
no more benign. In 1848, when revolution swept across Europe,
the Hungarians, who chafed under Austrian Hapsburg rule,
immediately declared their independence. The Austrian emperor,
who already had his hands full with nationalist uprisings every-
Hungary and the Cold War 43
where else in the empire (which then included northern Italy,
a good part of the Balkans, what became Czechoslovakia, and
the southern part of Poland), appealed to his old enemy the czar
for help, despite long-standing enmity between the Austrian and
the Russian empires; and the czar, who like his predecessors felt
it to be his obligation (a kind of imperial noblesse oblige) to
support beleaguered reactionary monarchs everywhere, what-
ever his personal feelings about them, agreed to provide a Russian
army to invade Hungary and put down its revolution.
This the Russians did with exemplary efficiency and brutal-
ity, defeating the Hungarian army of independence, occupying
the country, restoring the Austrian imperial officials to power,
and executing the leaders of the uprising. General Bem, one of
the leaders of the army, was summarily shot, and became a Hun-
garian national hero (even though he was in fact Polish); his
name would figure largely in the later revolution of 1956. Sán-
dor Petőfi, Hungary’s beloved national poet and hero, the Mag-
yar equivalent of Byron or Lermontov, wrote his most famous
poems about the revolution, died in battle, and was buried
namelessly in a mass grave.
When asked how Austria would ever repay its debt to the
czar for restoring Hungary to Hapsburg rule, an Austrian dip-
lomat famously replied, “We shall astonish the world by the
depth of our ingratitude.” This proved to be true, but more
embarrassingly for the future, General Bem and Sándor Petőfi
became Hungarian national heroes. Hungarian schoolchildren
memorized (and still do memorize) Petőfi’s Nemzeti dal, the
national poem, with its appeal to Hungarians to rise and fight
the Russians—not even the communist party could prevent this
tradition once it came to power. As for General Bem, placing
flowers at the foot of his statue in Budapest would eventually
44 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
become a way of annoying both the Russians and the Hungarian
communist party. Hungary was a country in which history was
not part of the dead past but part of the tendentious present and
future, and where even statues were potent and troublesome
symbols.
After their attempt to achieve independence had been sup-
pressed by Russia, the Hungarians spent the remainder of the
nineteenth century exacting from Vienna the best price they
could negotiate for acquiescing in their own defeat. The empire
itself became the Austro-Hungarian empire or the “dual mon-
archy,” for the emperor of Austria-Hungary was also king of
Hungary; and wealthy or aristocratic Hungarians played an
increasingly important (and often reactionary) role in govern-
ment in Vienna, much to the dismay of the emperor, who dis-
liked the Hungarians more than all the other minorities of his
dizzyingly multiethnic empire put together.
Hungary was the breadbasket of the empire, however—a
vast, still semifeudal source of prosperity, which it was unwise to
ignore and impossible to satisfy. Their bid for independence
having been crushed by the Russians, the Hungarian upper
classes now sought to dominate and control the hated Slavs
within the empire, in pursuit of what came to be known as
“greater Hungary,” which they perceived as including Slovakia,
Slovenia, and Croatia, and with a seacoast on the Adriatic.
Since the empire could not survive without cheap food from
Hungary, and since the one thing the Emperor Franz Josef could
not afford was a repetition of 1848, he was forced to make con-
cessions to the Hungarian landowners and politicians. Much as
he disliked nationalism among the ethnic minorities within the
empire, he went to the trouble of learning to speak fluent Hun-
garian—no easy task—and was scrupulous about maintaining
Hungary and the Cold War 45
his dual roles as emperor of Austria-Hungary and king of Hun-
gary. Every concession he made to the Hungarians was of course
at the expense of the Slavs, and deepened the discontent of his
Slav subjects, who constituted more than 50 percent of the pop-
ulation of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Fortunately for him,
they were split into mutually hostile (and in some cases warring)
groups—the Serbs, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Slovenians,
the Slovaks, the Czechs, and the Galician Poles, to name but a
few—but any hope of reconciling the Slavs to being contented
Austro-Hungarian subjects was from the beginning fatally
compromised by the need to placate the Hungarians.
In this dilemma may be found, among other things, the seeds
of World War I, and the subsequent cataclysmic consequences
of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire, many of which
are with us still today. It would be exaggerating to argue that the
catastrophe was brought about by Hungarian nationalism alone,
but Hungarian nationalism certainly played as significant a role
as, for example, Serbian nationalism, in putting a match to the
powder keg that the Austro-Hungarian empire represented
behind the glittering facade of imperial Vienna.
Once, when his advisers were recommending some worthy
to the long-suffering Emperor Franz Josef for appointment as
a minister, the emperor asked about the man’s qualifications for
office. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he was told, “he is a patriot.” The
emperor thought about that for a moment and then, with infi-
nite distrust and suspicion, said, “Yes, but is he a patriot for me?”
That, of course, was the nub of the problem: there were patriots
aplenty in the dual monarchy—Hungarian patriots, Ruthenian
patriots, Czech patriots, even Austrian German patriots—but
there were hardly any patriots for the idea of a multiethnic
empire ruled by the Hapsburgs.
46 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
However, one of the striking achievements of czarism in the
nineteenth century was to make its royal neighbors and enemies
look good by comparison. Franz Josef might be doddering on
the edge of senility, his spirit broken by a succession of family
tragedies—his younger brother Maximilian had been shot by a
Mexican firing squad; his beautiful wife Elizabeth had been
assassinated by an anarchist while boarding a lake steamer in
Switzerland; his son and heir the archduke Rudolph and his
mistress had committed suicide together at Meyerling—but in
her lifetime the empress Elizabeth had at least not been in the
habit of writing her husband daily, semiliterate, hysterical letters
of advice, like those Nicholas II received from Alexandra. In
Germany, Kaiser William II might allow one of his officers to
dance on a tabletop in pink ballet tights and a tutu for after-
dinner entertainment, but at least his policies were not influ-
enced by the likes of Rasputin. Compared with the Russian
court, the courts of Berlin and Vienna seemed almost benign,
moderate, and sane.
Hungarians took note of this. Most of them did not want
the breakup of the dual monarchy; they merely wanted more
power, autonomy, and influence within it, as well as the right to
bully and dominate the adjacent Slav minorities in pursuit of
“greater Hungary.” All this was in line with economic develop-
ment in the late nineteenth century. Eastern Hungary was being
rapidly industrialized; mines were opening up to exploit Hun-
gary’s mineral wealth; capitalism was beginning to alter what
had hitherto been predominantly a rural, feudal, agricultural
economy, with nothing much in the way of an educated middle
class. Hungary might have a reputation for wildness, “Gypsy”
music, rich spicy cooking, and beautiful women; wolves and
bears might still present a danger to travelers in Transylvania;
Hungary and the Cold War 47
wealthy foreign visitors might still be entranced by shooting
parties on huge feudal estates where time seemed to have stood
still—but in fact the Hungarians were progressing rapidly
toward the twentieth century. Hungary might have become part
of a revitalized Austro-Hungarian empire, like the Czechs, had
not the empire itself under Franz Josef been impervious to
political reform and so deeply mired in the unpredictable vio-
lence of Balkan politics on its vulnerable southern flank that it
was at the mercy of events.
These events, of course, are too well known to require repeti-
tion here, except to note that following the assassination in 1914
of the heir to the throne, the singularly unlikable Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, and his morganatic wife while they were on an
official visit to Sarajevo, everybody’s worst nightmare came true.
Pessimists had always foreseen that Austria-Hungary would
lose control of events in the Balkans and draw the rest of Europe
into the abyss, and so it proved. As an integral part of the empire,
Hungarians found themselves drawn into war first with Serbia;
then Russia; then the Western allies, France and the United
Kingdom (the very countries Hungarians admired most); and
finally Romania, Italy, the United States, and even, improbably,
Japan.
Defeat, when it came, brought with it a whole new and
unrecognizable game, in which for a time it seemed as if Hun-
gary, after much sacrifice, might have drawn a winning card.
The Austro-Hungarian empire was gone at last, shattered into a
new world of small, independent, and mutually hostile coun-
tries. Imperial Vienna was now merely the capital city—the size
of Paris—only of German Austria, a tiny country the size of
Switzerland, while new countries with uncertain frontiers,
Poland and Czechoslovakia among them, had emerged from
48 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
the ruins of the empire. The Russian empire had vanished too,
and Russia, mired in revolution and civil war, had retreated hun-
dreds of miles back from its previous frontiers, for the moment
a threat to nobody but itself.
As a small nation craving independence, Hungary had high
hopes of being granted reasonable peace terms by the Allies,
particularly since there were a substantial number of Hungarian
immigrants in the United States. These hopes, alas, were not to
be realized. The Hungarian Parliament selected a liberal land-
owner, Count Mihály Károlyi, an idealist, to head the govern-
ment, in the hope that he and President Woodrow Wilson
would hit it off, but that was not to be. The Allies had obliga-
tions to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, and intended to
honor them at the expense of Hungary. Polish troops had actu-
ally fought on the western front, and in Ignacy Paderewski, the
world-famous pianist, the Poles had produced a political figure
whom everybody recognized and admired. The Czechs too, in
Edvard Beneš, had a leader who was greatly admired in the
United States. Even Romania, although it had entered the war
on the Allied side late (and with disastrous consequences for
itself ), had, in Queen Marie, a glamorous and impassioned
celebrity as a spokeswoman for her nation’s claims, most of them
against Hungary. Hungary had fought to the end—without
enthusiasm, it is true, but with exemplary loyalty to the doomed
Austro-Hungarian empire—and in the age of Wilson’s Four-
teen Points and of the self-determination of nations, its claims
to large amounts of land mostly populated by Slavs and non-
Magyars won it no friends at Versailles, where the new frontiers
of Europe were being drawn.
As the Hungarians were shortly to discover (to paraphrase
Orwell), seen from the Paris Peace Conference all forms of
Hungary and the Cold War 49
nationalism were equal, but some were more equal than others.
Wilson and Clemenceau looked with favor on Polish national-
ism, based on a reconstituted Poland, formed out of what had
been Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian territory; they
also favored Czech nationalism, even though it involved the
creation of a country formed out of a shotgun marriage between
the liberal Protestant Czechs and the reluctant and reactionary
Catholic Slovaks, and included what soon came to be seen as a
dangerous number of Sudeten Germans. But Hungarian nation-
alism held no appeal to the leaders of the Allied powers in Ver-
sailles. Hungary seemed to them feudal, backward, determined
to hold on to land that didn’t (or shouldn’t) belong to it, and
insufficiently apologetic for having fought on the wrong side for
four years.
Nor did Hungary present them with a picture of stability,
despite Károlyi’s best efforts to put a good face on things. Infla-
tion soared, apparently beyond control; aristocratic grandees,
whose titles derived from what was now an extinct empire, plot-
ted right-wing coups; Hungarian prisoners of war returning
from Russia brought communism back with them; a variety of
Hapsburg pretenders were on Hungarian soil—Hungary, inde-
pendent at last, seemed to have nowhere to go but down.
Beset by unrest on all sides and the threat of coups and plots
from the left and the right, Károlyi struggled on, staying barely
afloat in the murky waters of Hungarian politics until 1919,
when an Allied delegation presented the Hungarian govern-
ment with a map of Hungary’s new frontiers, causing the Hun-
garian deputy foreign minister to faint at the sight of it. Hungary
was reduced to a fraction of its former size; huge chunks of ter-
ritory over which Hungary had ruled undisputedly for years
were lopped off to satisfy the Poles, the Czechs, and the Roma-
50 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
nians; hundreds of thousands of Hungarians would wake up to
find themselves overnight living in foreign countries, where
their neighbors and the government hated them. This night-
marish scenario, intensified by the threat of invasion by the
Romanian army to enforce Romania’s territorial demands,
brought down Károlyi’s government and plunged the country
into chaos, in which the only people willing to seize power were
the communists.
Thus Béla Kun came to power, in January 1919; Hungary
was transformed, to the horror of the middle and upper classes—
and the Allies—into the Hungarian Soviet Republic, a full-
fledged dictatorship of the proletariat on the Danube. Kun,
though his reputation was much blackened in the years that fol-
lowed, was a Marxist theoretician rather than a man of action,
and his method of government relied on persuasion and propa-
ganda rather than violence. It did not help Kun that in a country
where anti-Semitism was widespread he was a Jew. Despite
Kun’s many appeals to Moscow for help, Lenin had problems of
his own and in any case was not inclined to see Hungary as the
right country in which to sponsor the westward expansion of
the communist revolution. All Marxist ideology taught that
Germany was the country in which this must take place, and
Germany in 1919 seemed on the brink of revolution in any case.
Kun received from Moscow any number of crisply worded tele-
grams urging him to take ruthless action against the class enemy,
and a few Hungarian-speaking envoys bearing the same mes-
sage—but he received no arms, no money, no offer of armed
assistance. He was on the verge of succumbing to a joint invasion
of Allied and Romanian troops when, in August 1919, a right-
wing counterrevolutionary army under Admiral Miklós Horthy
marched into Budapest, disposed of the communists with swift
Hungary and the Cold War 51
brutality, checked the advance of the Romanians, and instituted
the first fascist government in Europe—one which was to last
twenty-six years.
Those of Kun’s followers who escaped took refuge in the
Soviet Union, where Stalin had most of them quietly murdered
during the purges of the 1930s. Hungary itself settled into a
long, sleepy period under its new leader, who declared himself
regent of the kingdom of Hungary, though with no intention of
inviting any of the prospective kings to reassume the crown of
St. Stephen. Horthy was a conservative, even a reactionary, an
anti-Semite, opposed to trade unions and almost everything
“modern”; but once the communists and the invading Roma-
nians had been dealt with, he was all for the quiet life.
It was apparent to him, as it was to most Hungarians, that
caught as their small country was between Germany and the
Soviet Union, survival would depend on subtle, deft diplo-
macy—something on which Hungarians optimistically prided
themselves. Of the two powers, Horthy naturally preferred Ger-
many—he had been, after all, an admiral in the German-speak-
ing navy of Austria-Hungary; and he had no sympathy for
communists, or even for mild socialists. But in his own cautious
way he was determined to get the best price he could for Hun-
gary’s friendship, starting with the return of Transylvania, and
then of the lands “stolen” by the Poles, the Romanians, and the
Czechs.
Horthy was not a young man, and his style was not that of
his imitators in Italy and Germany. He did not posture and
strike belligerent poses like Mussolini; nor did he rant and rave
and threaten, as Hitler would. The huge open-air mass rallies
beloved by Mussolini and Hitler did not stir Horthy’s blood. He
had ridden into Budapest on a white horse, in his admiral’s uni-
52 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
form, in 1919 (thus re-creating the legend that what the people
were looking for was the arrival of a “man on a white horse”—
i.e., a military dictator—begun with General Boulanger’s failed
coup in late-nineteenth-century France). But at heart Horthy
preferred the comfort of a Mercedes-Benz limousine—he was
no swashbuckler but rather a canny, cautious, conservative poli-
tician. It is no accident that he ended up spending his last years,
after World War II, in the comfort of a villa in Estoril, Portugal,
surrounded by former kings as neighbors, rather than ending
like his fellow fascist dictators, cremated in the garden of the
Führerbunker in Berlin like Hitler and Eva Braun, or half-naked
and strung up by his heels upside down by the mob like Musso-
lini and his mistress Clara Petacci.
Horthy was, in any case, a family man, devoted to his wife,
and like Emperor Franz Josef, in whose navy he had served for
so many years, he was equally devoted to decorum, discipline,
and the bourgeois comforts of life. He resembled in many ways
an archetypal figure of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-
century central Europe: the stern, authoritarian paterfamilias,
affectionate, but distant, demanding, and intolerant toward dis-
sent of any kind—exactly the kind of father figure, in fact, who
played such a potent role in the neuroses that Sigmund Freud’s
patients brought to him, and to whom Freud himself, in private
life, bore a certain resemblance.
The fact that Hungarian fascism was less hysterical than fas-
cism in Italy or Germany—or that it put forth, for many years, a
blander, more comfortable image and a leader who seemed pro-
foundly respectable, and even dull, rather than a rabble-rousing
fanatic—does not, of course, make it any less fascist.
Before World War II—indeed almost until 1944—Hungar-
ian anti-Semitism was a good deal milder than German anti-
Hungary and the Cold War 53
Semitism under the Nazis, but this is not to excuse it, or deny its
existence. Laws defining who was Jewish and who was not were
based on religion rather than race, thus giving a good deal more
scope for “conversion.” Also, the Hungarian Jews themselves
were sharply divided between the more “assimilated,” middle-
class, urban Jewish population and a rural population in which
clusters of Orthodox or even Hasidic Jews stood out sharply
from the surrounding Magyars.
Through the 1920s and early 1930s, Hungary managed to
survive better than many had anticipated as an independent
country, no longer part of a multinational empire, and reduced
to a fraction of its former size. Agricultural richness; a wealth of
natural resources; a hardworking, well-educated, resourceful
population; and a growing industrial base produced a modest
level of prosperity. Hungary’s relations with its immediate
neighbors were strained, but peaceful. To the west, Germany
was moving like a sleepwalker from crisis to crisis; to the east,
Russia was moving from revolution and civil war into the deadly
stability of Stalinism; and while it is never reassuring for a small
country to be sandwiched between two giants, at least Hungary
was not one that either of its two giant neighbors dreamed of
destroying and annexing, as, for example, Poland was. Even the
beleaguered governments of Weimar Germany had never recon-
ciled themselves to the “Polish Corridor” or the loss of Danzig;
nor had the ordinary German—and Russia, whether commu-
nist or not, never gave up the hope of regaining all or most of
Poland. Nobody thirsted for Hungarian land—on the contrary,
it was the Hungarians who never lost sight of regaining what
they had lost to Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and
waited for the opportunity to do so.
A spirit of mild friendship existed in principle between the
54 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
Italian and the Hungarian fascist regimes. Like Mussolini, but
on a smaller scale, Horthy was treated with wary respect by the
Western democracies—the fact that he was against commu-
nism, socialism, and trade unions was in his favor among
“respectable” people, of course; and at the time anti-Semitism as
such was unlikely to offend most British, French, and American
politicians and bankers—not to speak of the Vatican—provided
it was discreet and did not involve unpleasant displays or vio-
lence in public. In Rome, Hungary was thought of as a “client
state,” with possibly conflicting ambitions in the Balkans, where
the Italians had seized Albania and had great ambitions to
expand farther at the expense of Yugoslavia and Greece. Still,
Hungary and Albania were the only countries not to vote
against Italy in the League of Nations over oil sanctions to
punish Mussolini for attacking Abyssinia; and there remained
to the end a Rome-Budapest axis, more important to Horthy
than it was to Mussolini.
“Fascism” is of course used today as a loose term of political
opprobrium, but in its own day, and in its original form, it had a
more specific meaning. On the deeper level it involved an under-
standing between “people of property” (i.e., big business, the
right-wing press, and the banks), the church, and the middle
classes, usually under the leadership of a single charismatic
leader, to support nationalist, reactionary groups of veterans who
had fought in World War I, in an effort to prevent the spread of
communism, undermine trade unions, and bypass parliamentary
democratic government.
Since the police were likely to be sympathetic toward veter-
ans (or were veterans themselves, if only of the military police),
they, as well as the army, which was officered by the middle and
upper classes, could usually be relied on to support fascism, tac-
Hungary and the Cold War 55
itly or openly. A modest degree of force—the rubber truncheon;
the castor oil treatment; the occasional outright murder, such as
that of the Italian journalist Matteotti—was applied when nec-
essary, but the general object of fascism was to stifle dissent and
bolster the existing establishment, while producing enough
drama in the way of rallies, parades, propaganda, and the occa-
sional foreign adventure to siphon off the energy of the lower
middle class and the working class, who might otherwise have
turned toward radical social reform or worse, communism.
Seen from Rome or Budapest, Nazism before 1933 looked
similar (hence the comforting belief of Mussolini and Horthy
that Hitler was their “pupil”), but the impulse behind it was
vastly more evil, bolder, and more destructive. Hitler was not the
servant of big business, the army, or the bourgeoisie, despite
what people still like to believe. His nihilism; his restless urge
for change; his willingness, even eagerness, to condone and order
bloodshed on a large scale—indeed the whole messianic side of
his nature—made the Nazi movement infinitely more danger-
ous than fascism. Weltmacht oder Niedergang, “world power or
destruction,” was not a motto that would have appealed to Mus-
solini or Horthy; but when Hitler said it, he meant exactly that,
and he would end his life following its ultimate logic.
The fascist world was of course turned on its ear in January
1933, when Hitler unexpectedly became Germany’s chancellor.
Germany, even in defeat, was a great European power, so that a
fascist Germany was therefore an altogether different kind of
beast from a fascist Italy or Hungary; and Nazism was an alto-
gether more radical movement, which included some very
strange and threatening ideas indeed. Horthy and Mussolini
had made their peace with the church and maintained cordial
56 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
relations with the Vatican; Hitler intended to subvert and uproot
religion from German life, and replace it with the cult of Nazism,
in which he himself was the messiah. Horthy and Mussolini
had territorial claims, which, with patience, could probably have
been met; Hitler dreamed of “world power” and of a Germany
that stretched from the Rhine to the Urals (and also dreamed of
exterminating those peoples he didn’t want in it, starting with
the Jews, of course, and eventually eliminating the Slavs).
The air over Germany from 1933 to 1945 was thick with a
heady mixture of energy, cruelty, and extravagant ambition, as
well as the residue of a century of pernicious Germanic non-
sense, which included drastic solutions to social problems rang-
ing from forced euthanasia for the mentally and physically
handicapped to the breeding and perfection of an Aryan super-
race, and strange theories about everything from Nordic runes
(with which Himmler hoped to prove that the Japanese were
Aryans) to the head shape of “the typical repulsive Jewish com-
missar type.” In pursuit of this head shape, SS squads would
eventually roam Poland and the Soviet Union, equipped with
exact instructions on how to kill their victims without damaging
the head, and special containers in which to send the head sam-
ples back to the anthropologists of the SS Institute of Race
Research.
None of this was at first evident—the coming to power of
Hitler seemed at first, in fact, to provide Hungary with a power-
ful and ideologically sympathetic ally, and, as Germany rearmed,
a strong and growing market for Hungarian raw materials and
manufacturing. Hitler kept a signed photograph of Admiral
Horthy in a silver frame conspicuously displayed on his desk, in
honor of Horthy’s role as the first fascist in Europe, and pro-
fessed great admiration for the regent, as Horthy was known.
Hungary and the Cold War 57
However, despite the fact that the Führer had been hastily natu-
ralized as a German citizen when it was realized that this small
step had been overlooked on his way to power, he remained in
many ways an Austrian, by birth, by upbringing, and in his gen-
eral attitude toward central Europe.
Hungary might seem distant and faintly romantic to Prus-
sians, but Budapest was less than 250 miles from Vienna, and
until 1918 had been part of the same empire. Hitler had no
romantic illusions about Hungarians, and he instinctively dis-
trusted anybody who spoke what Austrians called Miklós-
deutsch—that is, German spoken with a distinctive Hungarian
accent. He was unmoved by the czardas, by Gypsy music (he
intended to exterminate the Gypsies down to the last man,
woman, and child in any case), or by Hungarian charm. As an
Austrian, he held the Hungarians responsible for many of the
terminal problems of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and he
did not wish to be dragged into their disputes with their
neighbors, or have his Balkan policy determined by Hunga-
ry’s interests. If the Hungarians wanted his help in reclaiming
the lands they had lost at Versailles, they would have to dance
to his tune—“He who wants to eat must do his share of the
cooking,” the Führer said, with his usual blend of brutality
and cold realism.
Hungarian charm, polish, and duplicity might work wonders
in Rome, and even, to a degree, at the League of Nations in
Geneva; but they had the opposite effect in Berlin, where heel
clicking, hand kissing, and Schwämmerei were being replaced by
altogether more brutal manners, and where anti-Semitism was
swiftly moving beyond merely daubing insulting slogans on
synagogues, setting quotas in universities and medical schools,
or taunting the occasional bearded rabbi in the street.
58 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
Increasingly, Germany’s few political allies came to feel that
they were like passengers on a runaway train. There was no
question of getting off the train—for a small central European
country like Hungary, surrounded by enemies, the protection
offered by friendship with Nazi Germany was indispensable—
and at the same time there was no way to slow the train down.
Czechoslovakia had a military pact with France and the support
of Great Britain (neither of which would help it a bit in 1938);
and Poland constituted an integral part of the French defense
strategy, the idea being that the Czechs and the Poles would act
as a cordon sanitaire against the westward expansion of Russian
communism, and in the event of war with Germany would keep
the Wehrmacht busy on the eastern front while the French army
hunkered down behind the Maginot Line and waited on events.
But Hungary was not a beneficiary or a creation but rather a
victim of Versailles—along with Germany and Turkey, it had
been dismembered, laden with war guilt, and severely punished
by the victors.
Much as the Hungarians liked and admired France and the
United Kingdom, they were not naive enough to suppose that
they would get much help from Paris or London once Russia
regained strength. Horthy was many things, but he was not
naive, and as the 1930s went on, one disastrous event after
another confirmed his view that friendship with Germany was
the only ace in his hand. Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland; the
Allies and the League of Nations did nothing. When Hitler
rearmed and started to build the Luftwaffe, they still did noth-
ing. When he violated one of the major clauses in the Treaty of
Versailles by his Anschluss with Austria (thus advancing the bor-
der of Nazi Germany to the Hungarian frontier, and effectively
isolating the Czechs), again they did nothing. When he threat-
Hungary and the Cold War 59
ened to attack and dismember Czechoslovakia on behalf of the
Sudeten German minority, Daladier and Chamberlain flew to
Munich and agreed to cripple the state the French and the Brit-
ish had created less than twenty years earlier; and when they
returned home they were cheered by crowds of their fellow
countrymen for doing so.
Seen from Budapest, these events spoke for themselves. If
the Allied powers were unwilling or unable to support a demo-
cratic state which they had themselves created, and which
played, at least in theory, a major role in their defense, what kind
of help could Hungary expect? The answer was, clearly, none.
Not that there were any tears for Czechoslovakia in Hun-
gary. Early on in the crisis, the Hungarians had presented their
claim for the return of Slovakia to Hungarian rule once the
Czech state collapsed; Hitler listened with what the Hungarians
supposed was sympathy, and encouraged them to put additional
pressure on the Czechs. When push came to shove, however,
Hitler, having occupied Prague, was persuaded to turn Slovakia
into a German client state with a fascist government and a
Catholic priest, Monsignor Tiso, as the premier. The Hungarians
had missed the boat—their army had been in no shape to
threaten the Czechs or occupy Slovakia, and Hitler saw no reason
to reward them for inaction, or for agreeing to what they could
not in any case prevent. His mind was now set on crushing
Poland, which would be a much safer move if the Soviet Union
shared in the spoils. He still hoped to avoid a general war, but if
it happened, Romanian oil would be absolutely necessary to
keep the Wehrmacht moving. Germany’s friendship with the
Soviet Union and Romania—the very countries the Hungarian
government feared and disliked most—would mean that Hun-
gary could not expect to get more than a few crumbs off the
60 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
table with regard to reclaiming its territory. This no doubt
explains, as much as the poorly equipped state of the Hungarian
army, why Hungary remained neutral from the outbreak of
World War II in September 1939 to the German attack on the
Soviet Union in June 1941.
Neutrality, as everybody knows, has its advantages, but Hun-
gary was not Switzerland. Planted in the middle of central
Europe, with a government that sought friendship (and favors)
from Germany, and a growing and increasingly threatening
political minority that imitated the Nazis, Hungary was in no
position to sit the war out, nor was Hitler disposed to let it do
so. Diplomatic and economic pressure was applied, accompa-
nied by demands that Hungary should take a “harder” position
against the Jews and bring its anti-Semitic laws—and more
important, the severity with which they were carried out—more
into line with Germany’s own Nuremberg laws.
In a spirit of fatalism that bordered on the suicidal, Hungary
joined the Germans in their war against the Soviet Union, in
the expectation that it would be over quickly—as indeed every-
body supposed it would be—and that Hungary would share
modestly in the spoils. When the German army ground to a fro-
zen halt within sight of Moscow in the winter of 1941, it became
clear to the Hungarians—now that it was too late—that they
had lost their bet. The Soviet Union did not collapse, as Hitler
had foreseen (“The whole rotten mess will collapse once we kick
the door in,” he had promised); instead, the war in Russia would
be long, bloody, and destructive.
The Hungarian army, ill-equipped for a long campaign or
for the Russian winter, something less than enthusiastic, and
poorly supported by the Wehrmacht, suffered heavy casualties,
while at home the Horthy regime found itself under increasing
Hungary and the Cold War 61
pressure from Germany to harshen measures against the Jews.
In December 1941, the unthinkable happened—Hungary was
forced to declare war on the United States ,* and the United
Kingdom declared war on Hungary. Given the fact that there
was a large Hungarian-American population in the United
States, and that Great Britain and the United States were the
two countries Hungarians most admired, this was a fatal diplo-
matic step, made worse by the need to placate the Germans as
the Hungarian army was pushed back and decimated by supe-
rior Soviet forces. Jews were rounded up and sent as forced labor
to dig antitank ditches on the Russian front, where they died in
large numbers; communists, socialists, and trade unionists were
arrested and imprisoned. Still the Germans were not satisfied,
particularly when they began, inevitably, to hear rumors that
Horthy’s government was secretly trying to negotiate its way
out of the war.
By the early spring of 1944, the Hungarians were getting
desperate—the Hungarian army was in tatters, the Red Army
was advancing closer and closer to Hungary, and the Allies had
still not landed in France. At the end of his patience with Hun-
gary, Hitler browbeat Admiral Horthy into appointing a more
pro-German government, and sent eight German divisions into
Hungary to ensure Hungarian compliance. They were shortly
followed by SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann him-
* The Hungarian minister in Washington, to his great embarrassment, was obliged to read the Hungarian declaration of war to an incredulous Cordell Hull. “Has Hungary any claims or grievances against the United States?” the secretary of state asked. “No, no, of course not,” the Hungarian diplomat replied soothingly. “Against whom does Hungary have claims or grievances then?” A shrug: “Romania, Your Excellency.” “And is Hungary declaring war on Romania?” The Hungarian sighed and held up his hands helplessly. “No,” he said sadly; “unfortunately the Romanians are our allies.”
62 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
self, to oversee the beginning of measures to implement the
“final solution” of the “Jewish problem” in Hungary. The first
transports of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz took place, and
these deportations would not end until the SS had destroyed
Auschwitz itself, by which time nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews
had been murdered there.
The Allies’ landings in Normandy in June 1944, followed by
the attempt against Hitler’s life in July and the liberation of
Paris in August, convinced Horthy that he must act quickly if
Hungary was to join the winning side at the last moment. In
this regard, as in so many others, Horthy’s instinct was sound,
but his timing was fatally flawed. The Allied armies, bogged
down by transportation difficulties and limited supplies of fuel,
failed to take Antwerp, which would have provided them with
the major port they needed close to their front line; they also
failed to reach the Rhine, let alone cross it, and the German
army, resourceful as always, managed to end a retreat in the west
that was turning into a rout and form a strong defensive line.
The war would not, as many had predicted, be over before
Christmas.
The Hungarians’ hope for a quick victory by the Allies in
1944 was as futile as their hope for a quick victory by Germany
against the Soviet Union in 1941 had been. This time the con-
sequences were even more tragic. The war would go on until
May 1945, and Hungary would be squeezed between the infuri-
ated Germans and the remorselessly advancing Russians. The
Germans were determined to fight the Red Army for every
square foot of Hungarian territory, bringing about widespread
destruction as a kind of punishment for betrayal and lack of
enthusiasm—and of course to keep the murder of the Hungar-
ian Jews going for as long as possible. Budapest, which, like
Hungary and the Cold War 63
Prague, had been spared by the Allies’ bombers, would be utterly
destroyed by the Germans’ determined stand there and the
Soviet siege of the city. More than 25,000 civilians would be
killed, and a quarter of the city’s houses damaged or destroyed.
A Swiss diplomat reported to Bern, “Half the city at a rough
estimate is in ruins. Certain quarters have . . . suffered more than
Stalingrad. The quays along the Danube, and in particular the
Elisabeth Bridge and the Chain Bridge, are utterly destroyed. . . .
The Royal Palace has been burned to the ground. The Ritz,
Hungaria, Carlton, Vadazkurt, and Gellért hotels are in
ruins.”*Amid the ruins and the chaos of street fighting and artillery
bombardment, the German SS and paramilitary units of the
Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross party—really no more than armed,
uniformed thugs and criminals—sought out Jews and murdered
them, while from abroad Franklin Roosevelt, the pope, and the
British government begged the Hungarian government to put
an end to the deportations and murders. Horthy, who would
gladly have agreed to do so at this point, was powerless. His
beloved son Nicholas was kidnapped by the Gestapo and smug-
gled out of Hungary rolled up in a carpet, as a hostage for his
father’s good behavior; and Horthy himself would shortly be
arrested on Hitler’s orders and imprisoned in Germany, replaced
by an Arrow Cross government that was determined to fight on
to the bitter end.
The end, when it finally came, was tragic and ignominious.
Its capital in ruins, its countryside ravaged by war, its people
starving, Hungary, in April 1945, exchanged a German occupa-
*It is interesting to note the typically Swiss concern for hotels. Not for noth-ing are the Swiss known as a nation of innkeepers.
64 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
tion for a Soviet one. Hungary’s attempt to surrender to the
Western Allies failed completely, and although the Iron Curtain
had not yet come down, Hungary would shortly find itself on
the wrong side of it. Political power had evaporated in Budapest,
where there was no government left with which anybody would
have willingly negotiated.
Not that it mattered, for all practical purposes. In the provin-
cial city of Debrecen, under the close supervision of the Russians,
a “provisional government” had already been formed.
4.
Salami Tactics
For the second time in the twentieth century, Hungary had
chosen—or been obligated—to fight on the losing side in a
world war. The first time cost it two-thirds of its territory, and
left millions of Hungarians living under hostile governments,
with neighbors who hated them; the second cut it off from the
West and left it to the tender mercies of Stalin and the Hungar-
ian henchmen he had not killed in the great purges.
This was not only a political and human disaster, but also an
economic one. To the west of what would soon come to be called
the Iron Curtain, the countries of Europe would receive aid and
investment in vast quantity from America to put them back on
their feet again, as well as the blessings of the Marshall Plan.
Even Germany, the cause of everybody’s misfortune, would be
rebuilt with American money—the western part of it, anyway—
while just across the border from Hungary, Austria, birthplace of
many of the most notorious Nazis, including the Führer himself,
would actually be treated as a “victim” that had been “occupied”
by Nazi Germany, rather than as an integral part of it.
66 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
The Russians, far from subscribing to the American notion
of rebuilding those countries they now occupied, pillaged and
looted them instead, sending vast amounts of industrial machin-
ery and rolling stock back to the Soviet Union. Trade with the
East was, in any case, a chimera—the currencies of the eastern
European countries had little real value and the Soviet ruble still
less; nor did the Russians have anything to sell their new client
states. Poland was a wasteland full of horrors, and Hungary
hardly better off—only Czechoslovakia, which had escaped the
fighting, was still a functioning industrial power.
What the Soviet Union did have to export was ideology, and
the wherewithal and experience with which to organize and run
a police state controlled by a single political party. And so long
as Stalin was alive, the will to impose communism on other
nations was never lacking; nor was there any hesitation in using
the methods that had proved so productive in the Soviet Union:
the midnight arrest, torture, the forced confession, the show
trial, and the inevitable execution. As for the Hungarian com-
munists who returned to their homeland in the wake of the
Soviet army, they were a hardened lot, very often survivors
themselves of terror, arrest, torture, and prison camps in Russia,
and with an endless list of old grudges to pay off and scores to
even once they were at home again and in power. Some of them,
in 1956, would be “rehabilitated” and treated as heroes, posthu-
mously or not, but none of them—not even Imre Nagy, who
would become the martyred leader of the revolution—was with-
out blood on his hands. Those few foreign communists who had
survived Stalin’s terror were of necessity unsentimental realists
who understood the meaning of power.
Still, Stalin moved cautiously at first. He felt he had a valid
title to the countries of eastern Europe—indeed, in October
Salami Tactics 67
1944, after a long dinner in the Kremlin, Winston Churchill
had written down in pencil on a half-sheet of paper the relative
percentages of Russian and British influence that should be
maintained in these countries once the war was won.1 This
casual (and cynical) approach to the future of Europe, which
would have caused lively alarm in Franklin D.Roosevelt and the
U. S. State Department, resulted in Stalin’s getting 90 percent
control in Romania, Britain’s getting 90 percent in Greece, and
Hungary’s being split fifty-fifty between them.* While puffing
contentedly on his pipe, Stalin obligingly initialed the paper
with his blue pencil (he used a soft red pencil for initialing his
approval of the names of people he wanted executed), and
allowed Churchill to keep the document, which then had to be
concealed from the Americans lest they be shocked by this
example of old-fashioned, pre-Wilsonian great-power diplo-
macy, about which they had not been consulted. In the event, of
course, as Stalin doubtless anticipated, the Soviet Union would
have 100 percent of the power wherever its soldiers reached, and
that was that.**On the other hand, Stalin felt that the longer his allies could
cling to the illusion that some degree of democracy would be
put in place in eastern Europe (and that they would have some
degree of influence over what happened there), the better for all
concerned. The Soviet Union was exhausted and impoverished
*Eventually Stalin took 100 percent of Romania, tried to take more than his share of Greece by means of a communist uprising that was put down by Brit-ish troops, and simply ignored attempts on the part of Great Britain and the United States to influence events in Hungary. (He did, eventually, live up to his agreement with Churchill about Greece, however.)
**The one exception was Austria, from which all the Allies eventually with-drew together by mutual agreement.
68 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
by the war, and despite feverish efforts four years would elapse
before it tested a nuclear weapon, without which any confronta-
tion with America would be a risky business—Stalin was, as
always, willing to take the long view. The fruit would fall into
his hands when it was ripe, as he was fond of saying.
In the meantime, a government of sorts was emerging in
Hungary, in Debrecen rather than Budapest, which was in ruins
and still full of sinister violence. The sudden disappearance of
Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian
who had risked his life over and over again to save Jews from
the SS, and who was spirited away secretly by the Russians to
vanish into the gulag, where he died or was killed, was a perfect
symbol for the way the Soviet Union intended to deal with peo-
ple who were inconvenient in “liberated” Hungary—they disap-
peared, and were never heard from again. The government at
Debrecen was designed to plaster this unpleasing reality over with
at least a facade of democracy. A provisional “national assembly”
appointed an equally notional “government,” led by, of all people,
a tame aristocratic former Horthy general, and containing repre-
sentatives from most of the “bourgeois” political parties—an
artfully contrived group in which there were only two outright
communists visible among eleven ministers—to negotiate a
peace treaty. The provisional government was deftly created and
stage-managed by the Russians, chiefly for the purpose of keep-
ing the United States, Great Britain, and France quiet.
This was the kind of thing at which Stalin and the men
around him, particularly Mikoyan, Molotov, and Marshal
Voroshilov, were past masters—the puppets were moved so skill-
fully that hardly anybody even noticed the strings. The men who
had served in Horthy’s government and remained comparatively
undisgraced, the leaders of the bourgeois smallholders and peasant
Salami Tactics 69
parties and the leftist but noncommunist social democrats,
moved through the motions of liberal, democratic government,
while the real power in the country lay increasingly in the hands
of the Soviet ambassador, the occupying Red Army, the NKVD
(the Soviet secret police), and the Hungarian communist party.
A peace treaty was drawn up and signed; Hungary agreed to pay
huge reparations to the Soviet Union—a bill that was still com-
ing due at regular intervals in 1956—as well as to pay for the
cost of the Russian occupation; the big estates were systemati-
cally broken up; and efforts were made to form collective farms.
An election was held, in which communists won only 17 percent
of the vote, despite great efforts on the part of the Russians to
rig the election on their behalf; but this disappointing showing
did not prevent the communists from ending up with more seats
in the cabinet than the winning party after Marshal Voroshilov,
the president of the “Allied” Control Commission, made it clear
that he would not accept any other outcome.
The Hungarian communist party was sharply split between
those who had remained “underground” in Hungary in great
danger through the war and those who had fled to Moscow
before the war. It almost goes without saying that those who
had fled to Moscow—and survived the purges—were more
trusted by the Russians than those who had stayed behind, how-
ever courageous they had been. Chief among the former was the
brutal, bullet-headed communist leader Mátyás Rákosi, whom
the Horthy regime had handed over to the Russians in exchange
for the banners taken from Kossuth’s defeated army by the czar-
ist army in 1849—further proof of the extraordinary power of
historical symbols in Hungarian politics. In Moscow, Rákosi
had learned the importance of patience and the need to follow
the party line diligently—under Stalin, those who neglected to
70 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
do so, or failed to predict where it would lead, paid for their
inattention with their life in Moscow. Rákosi also learned the
value of terror as a political instrument. The members of the
Hungarian communist party walked a tightrope—every word
they uttered or wrote was carefully scrutinized, and the slightest
deviation from the party line led inexorably to arrest, torture,
disgrace, or execution. There were no trivial matters, no excep-
tions—the wrong opinion about a novel, or even a review of a
novel, could have consequences as fatal as expressing the wrong
political ideas in a newspaper article or in a speech. There was a
“correct” communist viewpoint on everything, however minor it
might seem, and party members were expected to be as alert to the
swift-changing party line in Moscow as animals on the African
plains are to the approach of a predator.
The first great schism in the postwar communist world was
Tito’s determination that communism in Yugoslavia should be run
from Belgrade, not from Moscow, and the reverberations of this
defiance spread swiftly throughout eastern Europe. The slight-
est sign of national independence among communists was con-
demned as “Titoism,” and punished by rigged show trials and
death. Since at Stalin’s order the Hungarian communist party
was playing the part of a loyal member of a coalition bourgeois
government, there were ample opportunities for Hungarian
comrades to overplay their role, and suffer the consequences.
Rákosi himself called the party’s strategy “salami tactics,” refer-
ring to Hungary’s favorite delicacy—instead of seizing power in
a single revolution, the party would carefully, patiently cut away
paper-thin slices of power, a slice here, a slice there, until even-
tually there was no place in the “coalition” for anybody but com-
munists. The main thing was not to alarm the western powers,
or the other parties in the Hungarian coalition government, so
Salami Tactics 71
comrades who went too far were punished for overzealousness
and failure to heed the party line, while comrades who didn’t go
far enough were punished for Titoism. The penalty for both was
the same: torture and death.
The fact that Rákosi and many of his closest collaborators
were Jewish of course did nothing to increase the popularity of
the Hungarian communist party in a country where, until very
recently, anti-Semitism had been official state policy, and by no
means an unpopular one until the Germans overdid it. There is
some possibility that Stalin, though he was anti-Semitic him-
self, shrewdly picked Jews to lead the Hungarian communist
party precisely because, faced with deep resentment from Hungar-
ians, they would always be obliged to look to Moscow for support,
protection, and guidance—there could be no chance that Rákosi
and his comrades would “do a Tito” in Budapest. At the same
time, the Hungarian communist leaders would feel themselves
to be isolated and under siege even when they were victorious and
in control of the country, always conscious that hostility toward
them, wherever it came from—church, peasants, trade unions,
the army—was based on something more than mere politics.
Salami tactics took time—four years, from 1945 to 1949—
but they worked. Although the communists never managed to
win even 20 percent of the vote, they gradually infiltrated the
other parties, and decided more and more of the important
issues. By 1947, the AVO (later to become the AVH, but always
pronounced by English-speakers as “the Avoh”), Hungary’s
Russian-trained secret police organization, was busy inventing
counterrevolutionary and fascist plots on the part of noncom-
munist political figures, who were either forced into exile if they
were lucky, or lured to Moscow (and from there sent to the
gulags) if they were not. A degree of prosperity was ensured by
72 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
allowing smaller businesses to remain in the hands of their own-
ers, and by not pressing too hard on the peasants to collectivize;
and rampant inflation was brought under control, though not
without widespread suffering.
Still, by 1947 the mask had been removed. The other politi-
cal parties were either abolished or incorporated into the Hun-
garian communist party, a rigged election was held in which
the communist party at last—in the absence of any competition
or opposition—won over 90 percent of the vote, and Hungary
became a “people’s democracy” in all but name.
Step by step, the regime increased its pressure on the church
(these efforts reached an infamous climax in the trial and imprison-
ment of Cardinal József Mindszenty in 1949), on owners of small
businesses, on landowners and former aristocrats, and above all
on the recalcitrant peasants and independent trade unionists.
At the same time, following the model of Stalin, and at his
orders, the communist party disciplined and “purified” itself with
ruthless efficiency. Those who had joined the party late, and
often under compulsion, were driven out of it and purged; there
were mass dismissals and arrests of anybody at any level of soci-
ety who was only a lukewarm supporter of the party line; and a
fierce witch hunt was instituted to seek out and destroy commu-
nists who might once have expressed sympathy for the Titoist
heresy—for it was no longer sufficient to be on the correct side
of the party line now; it was necessary to have always been on the
correct side of the party line, even many years ago, as far back as
the Spanish Civil War. Fierce denunciations; endless sessions of
“self-criticism”; and a detailed and exhaustive study of everything
a party member had ever said, written, or thought became com-
monplace, as the AVO searched, even at the highest level of the
party, for the slightest sign of “error.”
Salami Tactics 73
It is worth noting that Imre Nagy—who would later break
from the party, become the leader of the Hungarian Revolution,
and seal his own fate by withdrawing Hungary from the War-
saw Pact—was one of those who helped organize the AVO and
helped make it a supreme instrument of political repression.
Because Marxism was claimed to be “scientific” and because there
could therefore be only one scientifically “correct” answer to any
question, no shades of gray were permitted, in the present or ret-
roactively, in action or in thought. To deviate, or to have deviated or
even to have thought about deviating, from what was now the
party line was a crime, all too often punishable by death.
As always in left-wing politics, the revolution devoured its
own children. The most important victim of the purges was
László Rajk, former minister of the interior and right-hand man
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74 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
of Mátyás Rákosi. Rajk was a hardened communist who did not
shrink from violence himself; his crime was that he had been a
leader of the “underground” communist party in Hungary, rather
than being, like Rákosi, a “Moscow man.” He had also encour-
aged a certain amount of populist activity among student groups
and peasants, in order to make communism more popular by
giving it a more “Hungarian” tone—a tendency which lent itself
perfectly to accusations of Titoism.
Rajk was arrested, tried, tortured, and interrogated by his
peers (one of them none other than János Kádár, who would
shortly be arrested and tortured himself, only to reemerge first
as a supporter of Nagy; then as Russia’s choice to suppress the
Hungarian Revolution; then, after carrying out the mass repres-
sions that followed the revolution, as the artful architect of dis-
mantling communist rigidity). Rajk was executed and buried
secretly like many others, a victim of the party to which he had
devoted his life, but, in truth, neither a better nor a worse man
than those who had disgraced and killed him.
It would be futile to attempt to describe in detail the shifts in
party policy in Hungary that marked the last years of Stalin, partic-
ularly since much of it was a waste of ink, or blood. The arts, litera-
ture, and journalism were severely repressed and controlled, in strict
accordance with the Moscow “line,” thus stifling what had once
been one of the liveliest features of Hungarian life; state-owned
industrial concerns replaced private ones; the economy was directed
toward heavy industry, leaving the entire country bereft of even the
most ordinary consumer items, from clothing to lightbulbs; the
hagiography of Stalin was extended to enormous proportions,
reaching its peak in the giant statue of the Soviet dictator on Dózsa
György Street in Budapest, standing nearly sixty feet high on a rose
marble base marked with the inscription, “To the great Stalin from
Salami Tactics 75
the grateful Hungarian people.” Everywhere, the face of Stalin
gazed down from framed colored lithographs, usually accom-
panied by a slightly smaller portrait of Mátyás Rákosi.
In Hungary, as in the rest of eastern Europe, nothing worked.
Lines formed twice a day at food shops and bakeries for pur-
chases that were strictly rationed, this in the richest agricultural
country in eastern Europe; coal was in short supply, in a country
that had always been an exporter of it; trams squealed and rattled
through streets and between buildings that still bore the scars
and grime of war; cars, mostly Russian Pobyedas, were few and
far between, and usually signaled the passage of some official of
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76 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
the party or the government, or a sudden, terrifying visit by the
secret police. Budapest, which had once been the “eastern Paris,”
a kind of ville lumière on the Danube, was gray, grim, poorly lit;
its people were badly dressed, hungry, and living in fear, and with
good reason. Informers abounded; the slightest joke about the
regime or complaint about living conditions could get you
denounced and arrested; and in addition, all those who were of
“bourgeois” origin, or had once owned a business or belonged to
a “bourgeois” political party, or had served in the Horthy regime,
or still clung to their religious belief were subject to harassment,
constant suspicion, and the danger of arbitrary arrest.
The numbers are awesome. According to Miklós Molnár, in
his authoritative Concise History of Hungary, the total of those
questioned and charged with a political crime in the years of the
repression exceeded 1.6 million, of whom nearly 700,000 were
found guilty—this in a country with a population at the time of
less than 10 million. Of course Hungary was not Cambodia
under Pol Pot—the number of executions was relatively small,
and kept rigorously secret—still, all those who were found guilty
suffered in some way, as did their families, and the only way to
save yourself was to inform on somebody else.
The higher ranks of the party were not excluded. János Kádár,
who had helped to interrogate his mentor Rajk,* was himself
arrested and tortured—his testicles were crushed—and Imre
Nagy, who had helped to found the AVO, was dismissed from the
party. Control of the party was tightly held by a trio of sinister
*Miklós Molnár, who is anything but a sensationalist, writes that Rákosi kept a tape recording he had had secretly made of Kádár interrogating his old friend Rajk while Rajk was under torture, as “insurance” against future trou-bles from the ambitious Kádár. This gives an authentically grisly picture of life in Hungary under the communist regime.
Salami Tactics 77
executioners: Rákosi himself, the cold and brutal Ernő Gerő, and
the even colder and more sinister Gábor Péter, any one of whom
could have taught lessons in cruelty, deceit, betrayal, and hypoc-
risy to Shakespeare’s Richard III. The Hungarian communist
party was in some respects more Stalinist than Stalin himself.
Certainly it obeyed Stalin slavishly, unlike the Polish party, which,
while it did its best to obey the Kremlin’s wishes, was nonetheless
deeply ambivalent about trying to turn Poland—a fiercely anti-
Russian country, deeply religious, with strong trade unions—into
a replica of the Soviet Union. Rákosi had no such doubts, and
would allow none in the party—or indeed in the country.
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78 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
Dissent was stifled by terror, the arts were targeted by the
party to suppress anything but the most slavish imitations of
Soviet socialist realism, and the media were systematically
brought under strict party control. Even the smallest of private
businesses—cobblers, tailors, lawyers, and doctors—were abol-
ished, so that professional people and small businessmen joined
the former aristocrats in labor camps, or doing manual labor,
with the predictable result that nothing could be done that
required any degree of skill or knowledge, from repairing a clock
to putting new heels on your shoes.
This period ended abruptly with the death of Stalin, in March
1953. Events in the Soviet Union moved rapidly though, for
those whose lives depended on guessing the outcome of the inev-
itable struggle for succession, with much confusion. Lavrenty Beria,
whose power, as head of the secret police, was second only to
Stalin’s, was unexpectedly denounced by his colleagues, arrested,
and executed. A “collective” leadership was proclaimed, split
between the older figures around Stalin, men like Molotov and
Mikoyan, and their younger rivals, party apparatchiks and yes-
men to Stalin, like Georgy Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, and
Nikolay Bulganin. Rumors spread that the power of the secret
police would be curbed, that “socialist legality” would replace
outright terror, and that Stalin’s “excesses” would be ended; but
all of this was hard to decipher, even for the most astute of Krem-
lin watchers, since it all took place behind a somewhat uncon-
vincing display of solidarity among Stalin’s heirs. There was talk
of a thaw in the Soviet Union, though whether this would extend
to the people’s democracies of eastern Europe was unclear.
Then, in June 1953, the Hungarian leaders were called to
Moscow. Experienced Stalinists, they must have approached the
journey with deep misgivings, and wondered who among them
would fail to return. To everybody’s surprise, Mátyás Rákosi was
removed from the government, though left in control of the
party; his place was taken by Imre Nagy, whom Rákosi had dis-
graced and driven out. It did not escape people’s attention in
Hungary that fearsome as the Hungarian communist leaders
were, they could be summoned to Moscow and moved around
like so many chess pieces by the Russians. That the Russians’
choice fell on Nagy came as a relief to everybody but Rákosi and
his henchmen. Nagy was a “moderate”; he had opposed forced
collectivization of agriculture; and he had the look of a man
who enjoyed his food and his wine, rather than the ascetic, grand
inquisitor look of, say, Gábor Péter.
Nor was Nagy’s plumpness and bland smile a disguise—he was
a bon vivant; he enjoyed dancing with pretty girls in peasant cos-
tume and was photographed doing so; his ambition was said to be
to put a “human face” on communism, and he proceeded to do that
with amazing speed. Attempts to gather the peasants in collective
farms or, still worse, zovkhozes on the Soviet model, which were as
rigidly organized as the army, were slowed down; plans for even
bigger industrial collectives were shelved; people detained by the
secret police for political crimes were released; investment in con-
sumer industry was increased. It was not quite yet “goulash commu-
nism,” but it was a start, and overnight Nagy became very popular
indeed. And indeed there was something attractive about him, stiff
and awkward as he sometimes looked, a neatly tailored figure, lean-
ing back with a stout belly thrust forward, rather like a combination
of a penguin and the Michelin tire man. He spoke like a professor,
but his speeches were laced with earthy peasant phrases, and while
he was no spellbinding orator, he always managed to sound sincere.
He was a decent man, reputed to have a good sense of humor,
unusual character traits among the scowling brutes who had hith-
Salami Tactics 79
80 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
erto been running Hungary on Moscow’s orders, and who now
hated Nagy and waited impotently for their revenge.
Nagy ran Hungary for almost two years, and “lifted the lid off
the pot” just enough to let a little of the steam out. Life was better,
and food more plentiful; though Hungary was still a police state,
the worst excesses of the terror were ended, and a certain freedom
of thought in the arts was permitted once again. Best of all, Nagy
seemed to have the gift of doing all this without alarming the
Kremlin. Georgy Malenkov, the plump apparatchik whom Stalin
had so often terrified and humiliated at the dinner table with
coarse and threatening humor, had emerged as the Soviet leader,
and he and Nagy seemed made for each other, both fat men who
enjoyed a good meal, and above all wanted to combine commu-
nism with a certain degree of bourgeois comfort.
This comparatively benign period ended when Nikita
Khrushchev succeeded in ousting Georgy Malenkov. Khrush-
chev, despite his gold-toothed smile, his portly physique, and his
red cheeks, was an altogether tougher person than Malenkov.
Khrushchev had “made his bones” (as they say in the Mafia) in
the communist party by his energy in forcing the Ukrainian
peasantry at gunpoint into collective farms and executing in
huge numbers the kulaks, which is to say the wealthier and
more successful farmers. It was his success at both these enor-
mously cruel tasks that first brought the young Khrushchev to
Stalin’s attention. Khrushchev had mastered to a high degree
the art of looking jolly,* but a close look at his eyes told a very
*As a Russian-speaker, I was one of the undergraduates chosen to translate for Khrushchev and Bulganin when they visited Oxford in 1954, and there-fore had a good opportunity to observe Khrushchev close up. When he came to Magdalen College—my own college—he was taken to see Magdalen Tower, one of Oxford’s most admired pieces of architecture. The president of the college, T. S. R. Boase, explained to Khrushchev that it was an Oxford tradi-tion, hundreds of years old, that on the first of May every year, the Magdalen
different story, though of course this is not to say he was another
Stalin.2
On the other hand, eager as he was to exorcise the ghost of
Stalin, he was a shrewd judge of power politics; he recognized
the Western recognition of the Federal Republic of Germany in
the autumn of 1955, and the swift rearmament of Germany, as a
signal to rein in the Soviet satellite countries before they got out
of hand. Much as the eastern European countries might wish
otherwise, they were needed to help defend the Soviet
motherland.
Khrushchev had his own problems with the Soviet generals,
not all of whom were eager to bury Stalinism along with Stalin,
and at the very least he did not want to be blamed by them for
any lukewarm response to Soviet demands for more troops.
The formation of the Warsaw Pact was the Soviet reply to an
independent West Germany, and the people’s democracies were
brusquely ordered to expand their armies and invest in the
heavy industry that was required to equip them with modern
weapons. Under the circumstances, Nagy’s reforms in Hungary
were suddenly seen to have been a movement in the wrong
direction, and he was swiftly removed from office and replaced
by his old nemesis Rákosi.
Nagy was lucky that his life was spared—if the decision had
been up to Rákosi and Gábor Péter, he would no doubt have been
executed; but in Moscow it was thought sensible to keep him
alive in case Rákosi made difficulties. In the meantime, Hungary
School choir sang hymns from the top of the tower at dawn, and that thousands of people waited all night, in a festive atmosphere, to hear them. Khrushchev stared up at the tower belligerently. “Why?” he asked, with great impatience. Then, turning to Bulganin, he said irascibly, “Can you believe how fucking superstitious these people are?” Tactfully, I did not translate this remark for the benefit of President Boase.
Salami Tactics 81
82 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
was back in the deep freeze of the cold war, and would remain
there, a victim of the changed balance of power between East
and West, because an armed, prosperous, and democratic West
Germany was a direct threat to the Soviet Union’s hegemony in
eastern Europe—one only had to compare East and West Ber-
lin at the time to see the contrast.
A Visit behind the Wall
I no longer remember what inspired Michael Maude and me to
drive through eastern Europe in his new MG. Maude, like myself,
was partly American (his mother was an American), without
being especially Americanized—indeed, he had done his national
service in the British army as a subaltern in one of the regiments
of the Foot Guards (I forget which), in part because it had been the
old regiment of his grandfather, a general in World War I.* Like
me, Michael Maude had served in the British zone of West Ger-
many, but had never been across the border into East Germany,
where we were absolutely forbidden to go, and this may have been
the reason for our trip behind the Iron Curtain, or perhaps he
only wanted to show off the MG to the East Germans.
My father was generally in favor of any kind of travel scheme,
however far-fetched, but he was uncharacteristically unenthusi-
*General Maude was famous in the British army, since he had lingered too long on the beach, which had been mined, looking for his luggage, during the evac-uation of British and ANZAC forces from Gallipoli, prompting a literary-minded officer to recite, in a parody of the well-known poem by Tennyson:
“Come into the lighter, Maude,For the fuze has long been lit,Come into the lighter, Maude,And never mind your kit.”
Salami Tactics 83
astic on the subject of our visiting Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and
Prague. He wondered aloud whether a trip through the wine
country of France might not be more amusing and safer; eastern
Europe, he thought, would be “very sad.” But eventually he gave
us his rather lukewarm blessing, and made a few calls to friends
such as Churchill’s old pal and financial adviser Brendan
Bracken, to make sure that the Foreign Office was alerted about
our trip, in case of trouble. Graham Greene, another family
friend, also consulted by my father, thought it sounded like
grand fun, and I think if the MG had had more than two seats
he might have come along.
Maude had come into possession of all the “kit” his grandfa-
ther had been searching for on the mined beach at Gallipoli—it
filled his sitting room overlooking Deer Park at Magdalen, and
we could see why the general had been unwilling to leave with-
out it. Here was everything an Edwardian officer might ever
need for a campaign anywhere in the world, all of it bound in
gleaming leather and green waterproof canvas, and marked with
General Maude’s initials: trunks, shotguns, binoculars, folding
bed, portable toilet, Sam Browne belt, sword and scabbard, a
Mauser “broomhandle” pistol, canteens, a campaign kitchen set
with monogrammed china and silverware, hatboxes, flasks of
every type and size, a vast pile of luggage that must have caused
many a soldier or coolie to sweat and swear and many a mule to
protest while carrying it. Maude wisely left the weaponry behind,
but even so, once his luggage had been strapped to the boot of
the MG and covered with a rainproof tarpaulin, it seemed
unlikely that the car would be able to climb even the smallest
hill.
In those days, a Channel crossing was still something of a
maritime adventure, on ferries that had once upon a time
84 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
served to evacuate the BEF from Dunkirk. We drove quickly
from Calais to the Belgian border—this was in the days before
the grand autoroutes were built, when you still drove through
France and Belgium on slick two-lane roads and skidded and
bumped through every town over cobblestones and tram
rails—surrounded by prosperity, crossed Belgium and Holland,
then crossed into West Germany without drama, and zoomed
onto the autobahn. West Germany was awash with prosperity;
everywhere you looked there were new Mercedes and Volk-
swagens galore, until we reached the Iron Curtain itself at
Marienborn.
Here, a whole different atmosphere awaited us. The East
German border guards and the scowling Volkspolizei looked as
if they were wearing old SS uniforms with the insignia removed,
and their attitude was frosty, unfriendly, and suspicious. You
waited, in a room smelling of damp wool, boot polish, and sau-
sages, while every page of your passport was scrutinized. All
Maude’s luggage had to be carried inside, unstrapped, opened,
inspected. It did not help matters that we were keen amateur
photographers—the serial number of every camera and lens had
to be written down meticulously on the back page of our pass-
ports and on a list kept by the police.
I realize now, of course, that our own appearance did us no
good in their eyes. Maude was wearing his officer’s “British
Warm” overcoat, and I was wearing my old R.A.F. leather flying
jacket, with a fleece lining and collar. With our polished shoes,
tweed sports jackets, narrow cavalry twill trousers, Viyella shirts,
and striped ties, we could not have looked more like two young
British military men in civilian clothes, setting off for a clandes-
tine photographic journey through the German Democratic
Republic. We might as well have been in full uniform. Even the
Salami Tactics 85
MG inspired suspicion, since it resembled a sporty stage prop,
with its chrome wire wheels and fold-down windshield.
In contrast to those in West Germany, the East German
autobahn was empty, except for the occasional Soviet military
convoy. The MG seemed to cheer the Russian soldiers up no
end—perhaps they thought that if this was the best Western
technology could produce in the way of a car, the cold war was
as good as won. We spent a night in West Berlin—which was
then rather like Broadway and Forty-second Street with a Ger-
man accent—and crossed into East Berlin the next morning.
This, we quickly realized, was the real thing: gray, dingy,
dreary, still full of huge piles of bomb rubble, the horizon domi-
nated by hideous new gray cement buildings and giant, hid-
eously ugly memorials to the Soviet “liberators.” The wide
avenues were empty of traffic; the people were shabby and
unwilling to look in our direction; the police presence was over-
whelming; the shop windows were empty. It was the world
George Orwell had described in 1984. But Dresden, when we
got to it, made East Berlin look like Paris. Thanks to the Royal
Air Force and Air Chief Marshal “Bomber” Harris, the head of
Bomber Command, 1,000 bombers had leveled it in a firestorm,
in the spring of 1945, leaving behind a charred and blackened
moonscape. Here we were treated not only with suspicion but
with outright hostility, as representatives of the country that
had bombed and destroyed one of Europe’s most beautiful cit-
ies. Cold war or no cold war, here the British were still the
enemy. It was only with great difficulty that we were able to find
a restaurant that would serve us at all—even though the restau-
rants were empty, all the others had claimed to be “booked
up”—a huge, institution-like place, with ghastly food and weak
beer. In Leipzig, we were almost arrested by the Volkspolizei for
86 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
taking a photograph of the MG outside the railway station, and
all the way to the Czech border we were followed by a succes-
sion of shabby cars full of plainclothes policemen.
Prague, when we got to it, came as a relief. People were at
least pleased to see two Englishmen with pockets full of hard
currency, and at last there was something to buy, if you liked
glassware. Alone of central European cities, Prague had survived
the war unscathed, and still showed signs of its former beauty,
but it is almost impossible to describe the drabness, the poverty,
the lack of neon or bright lights, the emptiness of the streets,
and the constant ominous presence of the police. Even the pur-
chase of a postage stamp caused suspicion and fear on the part
of the postal clerk, as if selling a Czech stamp to a foreigner was
a crime.
To arrive back in the West—in Munich—was like returning
from Mars. We had contemplated going on to Budapest, but in
Prague we decided to skip it. As usual, my father had been
right—eastern Europe was a very sad place to visit. Behind the
Iron Curtain was where so much of the twentieth century had
gone hideously wrong. The scars of war were still unhealed;
the miasma of guilt, betrayal, and anger was as unmistakable
as the gritty, coal-specked mist and the smell of old brick dust
and fire. Long before John le Carré wrote The Spy Who Came in
from the Cold, it was the atmosphere that he would capture so
perfectly, and that would permeate so much of his best work.
Eastern Europe was stuck—stuck in the past, stuck in 1945.
Although the Russians would soon be testing their own hydro-
gen bomb and putting the first satellite into orbit, there was
nothing they could do to improve the lives of the people who
lived in the countries they controlled, for they too were stuck—
stuck with a rigid ideology that admitted no deviation or error;
Salami Tactics 87
stuck with a doctrinaire view of economics that would eventu-
ally lead them nowhere; stuck with Marxist, state-run plans
for growth that would eventually sink the Soviet Union and all
the people’s democracies beneath the weight of their own
heavy industry, while remaining unable to satisfy the consumer
needs of the population. The party’s need to maintain a police
state; its stranglehold on artistic expression and opinion; the
ever-increasing demand for obedience, discipline, and ortho-
doxy—all of these things made it impossible for them to com-
pete with the West. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin had led them into
a blind alley.
Hungary was no exception.
In April 1955, Nagy was removed from office, and all power
was once again in Rákosi’s hands. Nagy was even expelled from
the communist party, and obliged to hand over his party card—
the ultimate humiliation. Yet here, too, there was a sign of weak-
ness. Stalin would have had Nagy executed; but instead Nagy
merely retired to his country house to live comfortably.
Rákosi recklessly plunged Hungary back into a political
deep-freeze, even as the Soviet leadership performed a ritual
journey to Canossa by flying to Belgrade to apologize to Tito.
Thus Soviet policy, perhaps inadvertently, undercut the position
of communist leaders in the satellite nations. This very danger-
ous fault line widened abruptly in February 1956, when
Khrushchev
made his famous speech at the Twentieth Party Congress
denouncing Stalin and Stalin’s crimes. In Poland, Hungary, and
Czechoslovakia Stalin was still being praised and Stalinism was
alive and well; in Moscow Stalin was being reviled. Future criti-
cism of Khrushchev for being “impulsive” scarcely does justice
to the imprudence of this line.
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90 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
The consequences were quick to arrive. In Poland the trade
unionists made demands that the government would not meet;
they went out into the streets of Poznan to protest, and were
promptly shot down by the “security forces.” In Hungary, the
“Petőfi circle” of anti-Rákosi communists and intellectuals held
debates on the most controversial of social issues, some of which
were broadcast into the street by loudspeaker. Rákosi wanted
the Petőfi circle crushed, but the Soviet leadership, appalled by
what seemed to be the first act of a proletarian revolution against
the communist party in Poland, instead sent Anastas Mikoyan
to Budapest, first to calm down Rákosi; then, when this proved
impossible, to replace him with Ernő Gerő, another murderous
brute, but at least a different and somewhat chastened one.3 Yuri
Andropov, future head of the KGB, who was then the Soviet
Union’s ambassador to Hungary, informed Gerő that Comrade
Rákosi would be kept in the Soviet Union for as long as neces-
sary, and advised helpfully that the Hungarian press should
announce he was receiving “prolonged medical treatment.” 4
On the other hand, the damage had been done. The Rus-
sians had urged conciliation on the shaken Polish government;
Mikoyan had removed Rákosi; the lid was off the pot.
It was too late. The contents were about to boil over.
5.
“Arise, Magyars!”
A s everybody who reads history knows, it is precisely the
moment when those in power seek to reform or ameliorate
conditions that leads to revolution—a fact that Louis XVI
ignored when he summoned the Estates-General to Versailles
to discuss tax reform in 1789. It should have come as no surprise,
therefore, that the Soviet Union’s attempt to smooth matters
over in Poland—by forcing the reluctant Polish government and
party to accept the dissident Wladyslaw Gomulka back into their
ranks—and Anastas Mikoyan’s dismissal of Rákosi in Hungary
had an effect that was diametrically opposite to what was intended.
Far from calming things down, it heated things up.
In Hungary, the immediate result was a demand for a state
funeral for László Rajk. The government gave in to this demand,
and the funeral suddenly blossomed into a huge, spontaneous
public event, unprecedented in a communist country. Mrs.
Rajk—who behaved with great dignity—was accompanied to
the cemetery by a procession of over 100,000 people, including
many of those who had helped condemn Rajk, as well as many
92 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
of Rajk’s victims, marching silently through the streets of Buda-
pest, while the AVH and the police looked on impotently.
This was followed very shortly by an announcement of the
demands of the intellectual Petőfi circle and various student
groups—including the withdrawal from Hungary of Soviet troops,
the cancellation of further reparations payments to the Soviet
Union, the return to power of Imre Nagy, and free elections.
On October 23 an immense procession calling for the imple-
mentation of these twelve or sixteen demands (the number varied
according to the speaker) set out to honor the heroes (and mar-
tyrs) of the revolution of 1849, Petőfi and General Bem. Imre
Sinkovics, an actor from the Hungarian National Theater, recited
the words of Petőfi’s “National Poem” beneath his statue (they
had lost none of their ability to arouse patriotic fervor to a white-
hot intensity over the last 108 years), and the crowd, now over
300,000 strong, began to move through the streets of Budapest.1
The members of the government briefly watched this astonish-
ing scene, discussed using the security police to open fire on the
demonstration if it got out of hand, but then came to the alarming
conclusion that an order to fire might not be obeyed. Once again,
the fear of using force doomed those in power—the communist
party and government in Hungary in October 1956 were as help-
less as the monarchy of France had been in 1789 or the czar in
1917. The crowd began to tear the Soviet symbol out of the center
of the Hungarian flags they were carrying; this was in accordance
with demand number fourteen of the Petőfi circle’s manifesto: “the
replacement of emblems that are foreign to the Hungarian people
by the old Hungarian arms of Kossuth.” They then began tearing
down communist stars, emblems, and flags from the buildings they
passed, with the help of the firemen of Budapest, who brought their
trucks and ladders to reach the ones that were high up.
Growing in numbers, one part of the crowd moved to try to seize
the radio station, while others marched on the newspaper offices
and still others to the giant statue of Stalin. The last group, with
immense effort (and the help of a passing truck carrying a welder
and his tools), finally succeeded in toppling the statue, leaving
behind on top of the rose marble plinth only two giant bronze boots
over six feet high. There was very little disorder, despite later claims
to the contrary, and no looting. Such disorder as there was consisted
of people bringing framed and unframed portraits of Lenin, Stalin,
and Rákosi out into the streets and burning them, along with these
men’s collected writings. The occasional bonfires had a certain sinis-
ter quality, however, as if presaging the shape of things to come.
The situation was now completely out of hand. The statue of
Stalin was dismembered; people stopped in the street to spit on
its giant head; stonemasons appeared from nowhere with their
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94 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
tools to obliterate the carved inscription on the plinth of the
statue; the AVH and the security forces either attempted to van-
ish into civilian clothes or barricaded themselves in their head-
quarters to defend their lives. In their absence, the authority of
the government was, for all practical purposes, at an end. As in a
city in the midst of a general strike, all services ground to a halt.
The crowds increasingly took up the chant Ruszki, haza! Ruszki,
haza! (“Russians go home!”), and began to call for Imre Nagy,
who had returned to the city from his home on Lake Balaton.
Although the hard-liners of the central committee—men like
Gábor Péter and Ernő Gerő—were, now that it was too late,
anxious to use force to “restore order,” it was increasingly obvious
that this could be done only by calling in the Russians. By the
middle of the afternoon, military cadets, policemen, and soldiers
were already marching with the crowds of demonstrators and
tearing the Soviet stars and emblems off their caps and uniforms.
Already, weapons were appearing in the hands of civilians. The
party had stockpiled plenty of weapons around the city in facto-
ries and government buildings, to use in case of a challenge to
the party’s rule, and these were now about to be used against it—
in a country where military service had been compulsory for years,
there were very few people unfamiliar with the use of weapons.
By the early evening a mass of people—perhaps as many as
250,000—had assembled in Parliament Square, shouting for
Nagy to appear. At first the government attempted to disperse
the crowd by turning the lights off in the square, but the dem-
onstrations grew so unruly that they were switched back on
again. Eventually, sweating and nervous despite the cold night
air, Nagy, who had been persuaded with great difficulty to
address the crowd, appeared on a balcony, and was cheered for
many minutes. “Comrades . . . ,” he started off, but the people
“Arise, Magyars!” 95
shouted him down with cries of “No more ‘comrades’!” Nagy,
who had been a communist all his adult life, had to start again,
with some embarrassment, addressing them instead as “young
Hungarians.”
In the meantime, a separate drama was taking place outside
the government radio station, where a recorded speech by Ernő
Gerő was about to be played. Gerő ’s speech was harsh, threaten-
ing, and unconciliatory, and it sparked off the first moment of
real violence. The crowd demanded a microphone to broadcast
their demands and repudiate Gerő ’s speech; the woman director
of the radio station refused; people began to throw bricks
through the windows of the building; and then somebody
backed a van into the big wooden gates at the entrance and
knocked them down. At this the AVH guards in the building
fired tear gas into the crowd and opened fire with automatic
weapons.
The party and the government were aware, from the very
beginning, of the profound importance of the radio station. A
modern revolution requires control of the media, and a radio
station is a more significant weapon than guns. The building
had been garrisoned with AVH guards, and in the streets out-
side were tanks and troops of the Hungarian army. Perhaps the
most critical moment of the revolution was now about to occur.
As the hated AVH fired into the crowd, the soldiers in the
trucks or standing on tanks began to hand their weapons down
into the crowd. The weapons were passed overhead from hand
to hand, gleaming dully in the light of the streetlamps, until
they reached the people in front, who began to fire back on the
AVH. The crowd was packed tight. There was no way to duck
or lie flat. People squeezed and pushed each other to make way
as the wounded were dragged through to the outer edges of the
96 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
crowd. Medical students in white coats appeared to help them.
At last those of the crowd who were armed managed to break
into the radio building. AVH members who were trying to
change into stolen civilian clothes were shot, as were some who
had hidden in the women’s lavatory. Others were thrown out the
windows into the street, and killed there.
Similar scenes were taking place in the newspaper offices
and elsewhere, although the headquarters of the communist
party was too strongly defended by tanks for the crowd to
reach.
At the party headquarters, the senior members of the party
and the government, many of them by now scared out of their
wits, struggled to decide what to do. Gerő ’s speech was widely
criticized, even by hard-liners, as having been injudicious and
inflammatory, but with the radio station now in the hands of the
insurgents it no longer mattered. In the end two decisions were
made that were mutually contradictory and reflected a certain
fatal ambivalence: to call Moscow and ask for Russian troops to
restore order, and to appoint Imre Nagy prime minister.
The call to Moscow, if it was ever made, was unnecessary—
Moscow had already made up its mind. At a meeting of the
Presidium of the Central Committee of the Soviet communist
party, Nikita Khrushchev had already spoken out in favor of mil-
itary intervention; Russian troops were already entering Budapest
and were moving to secure every important point in the country.
As for Nagy—who was hastily reinstated as a party member
and a member of the Hungarian Central Committee—he would
deny to the very end that he had been involved in calling the
Russians in. His immediate concern was to put together a gov-
ernment that contained enough “real” communists to satisfy the
Russians and enough “reform” or “liberal” communists to pacify
the rebels in the streets.
“Arise, Magyars!” 97
But it was already too late. As dawn came, fighting was
widespread. Soviet military aircraft flew overhead, and Soviet
tanks and armored personnel carriers moved through the city in
large numbers—it was an impressive show of force, but it was
not sufficient to produce a knockout blow. The Soviet forces in
Hungary were large, but they had a whole country to occupy,
and for the most part they consisted of conscripted soldiers—
the Soviet equivalent of Britain’s “national servicemen”—armed
with weapons left over from World War II. There were plenty
of tanks, but they were mostly T-34s, not the newer T-55s, along
with some very much heavier JSIIIs—then the world’s biggest,
heaviest tank, really too big for street fighting—and a mixed bag
of self-propelled heavy artillery.
Still, given their numbers and their preponderance of heavy
equipment, the Soviets ought to have been able to put down the
uprising; but they badly underestimated the anger of the insur-
gency and its determination to fight, as well as its advantage in
knowing every alley, street, and building in Budapest.* The fact
that so many of the fighters were young also meant that they
were willing to take risks that might have seemed unimaginable
to an adult. The techniques the young people—many only
schoolchildren—used to destroy Soviet tanks were amazing.
The most reliable and widespread was the famous Molotov
*It is difficult to estimate how many Hungarians took part in the fighting, since many fought, then gave up their weapons to somebody else, then rejoined the fighting later. A figure of 4,000 in Budapest (and perhaps as many again in other major cities) is often given, but that probably represents only the num-ber of fighters actually armed and in the streets at any one time. The total number of people who took part in the fighting at one time or another during the two phases of the struggle would be far higher. C. Philip Skardon, an ana-lyst at the CIA at the time, put the total number of fighters at 15,000, of whom 2,502 were killed and almost 10,000 wounded, and this seems plausible. The number of those executed afterward was in the low hundreds.
98 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
cocktail—an improvised antitank weapon, originally devised by
the Soviets, consisting of a liquor bottle full of gasoline with a
gas-soaked rag stuffed into the neck of the bottle. To use a
Molotov cocktail, it was necessary to sneak up close to the tank,
run toward it from behind (largely a blind spot for the tank
crew), light the gas-soaked rag, then fling the bottle upward
from a distance of less than six feet so that it landed on the
cooling vents of the engine compartment, dousing the engine
with blazing gasoline. Either the engine caught fire, forcing the
crew to abandon the tank by climbing out of the hatches (and
be shot down by older insurgents from nearby doorways), or the
tank blew up (“brewed,” as we used to say in the British armed
services), incinerating the crew.
There was never a shortage of empty liquor bottles, of course,
or, as it turned out, of young people to throw them at tanks. As for
the tank crews, they hated city streets, particularly the narrower
ones, where every doorway and window might hide a kid with a
Molotov cocktail, and where everything from felled streetlamps
to trucks and streetcars could be used to create improvised barri-
cades that would slow down a file of tanks or stop it altogether.
Tank crews like open country, with areas of good cover from
which to shoot; and like all soldiers they have a particular dislike
of fighting against amateurs who don’t take prisoners. And from
the very beginning, neither side was inclined to show mercy.
Anybody who tried to surrender was likely to be shot, and while
the medical students very bravely picked up the Hungarian
wounded under fire, they did not bother trying to save the Rus-
sians, who, for their part, didn’t pay much respect to people in
white coats, or to ambulances marked with a red cross.
From dawn on day one, the Russians used their artillery at
the least sign of resistance. Since the Russian army in Hungary
“Arise, Magyars!” 99
had never been intended to fight NATO—it was primarily an
army of occupation—the tanks carried high-explosive ammuni-
tion for use against buildings and fortifications, rather than
armor-piercing rounds for fighting against other tanks, and this
did enormous damage to buildings.* Budapest had been
remorselessly shelled during the Russian siege in 1945, and now
it was to be shelled again.
If the Kremlin had anticipated that a demonstration of
brute force would calm things, it was badly mistaken. The effect
of Soviet tanks in the streets of Budapest (and other cities) was
like a bear smashing its paw into a wasps’ nest—even sincere
communists were likely to pick up a weapon and fire back. The
Hungarians were divided about many things, but they were
determined to resist the Russians with lethal violence. To the
horror of the Kremlin, Imre Nagy, and the Western powers, the
morning of October 24 saw Budapest in the throes of a full-scale
battle, in the midst of which the soothing words on the radio
announcing that Nagy had been appointed chairman of the
Council of Ministers—in effect, prime minister—had very little
effect.
Except for the appointment of Nagy himself, the new gov-
ernment pleased nobody, since Ernő Gerő, a hated and reviled
Stalinist, was first secretary of the party; and the hard-liner
András Hegedűs was first deputy chairman of the government.
In short, Nagy seemed to be hemmed in between two of Rákosi’s
*Later, when the Russians came back into Budapest with first-rate, well-equipped armored divisions from the Ukraine, they left their bases so quickly that they had no time to exchange the armor-piercing (AP) shells in their tanks for high-explosive ones. These AP rounds tended to make a neat hole in a building before exploding inside, rather than bringing the whole side of a building down into the street, and were nothing like as effective against makeshift barricades.
100 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
closest collaborators. In the streets, shouts and placards with
the slogan “Death to Gerő !” began to alternate with “Russians
go home!”
The Russians’ plan had been to seize the key points in the
city quickly—the bridges, the main street junctions, the tele-
phone exchange, the barracks, the railway station—but by mid-
morning they were bogged down in fierce firefights throughout
the city, for the insurgents were being joined by the Hungarian
army, with its own tanks and antitank guns. At the same time, a
general strike was spreading, paralyzing the country as trains
came to a halt, and adding large numbers of armed workers to
the ranks of what the world press was already calling the Free-
dom Fighters.
At noon, Nagy broadcast an appeal for a cease-fire, promis-
ing that all those who laid down their arms before two in the
afternoon would be spared. He urged a quick “return to peaceful
and creative work,” but by then the fighting in the streets was
out of control, with tank battles taking place all over the city.
Nobody laid down arms at two o’clock—instead, a rather more
sinister event took place: the arrival at party headquarters of
Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, both Soviet deputy
premiers, who had flown from Moscow and been brought from
the airport in a heavily escorted Soviet armored vehicle. Mikoyan
was wily, tough, and shrewd, one of Stalin’s most resourceful
trouble shooters, Suslov was the party theoretician and a con-
firmed hard-line Stalinist. Both men were appalled by what they
saw, and by the paralysis of the Hungarian government and
party, which they blamed on Gerő rather than Nagy.
Fighting raged through the day and on into the night, while
the government tried and failed to persuade the Hungarian
army generals to break off their support of the insurgents. In
“Arise, Magyars!” 101
the evening János Kádár—who still had, in most people’s eyes, a
certain prestige from having been tortured at the height of
Rákosi’s purge of the party, and as a result had been made a
member of the Hungarian Politburo and a secretary of the
Central Committee—made a broadcast, calling the Russians
“our brothers and allies,” which had a very poor effect. Gerő,
Nagy, and Kádár had all three made broadcasts in the past
twenty-four hours—Gerő ’s was widely held to have exacerbated
the insurgency, and certainly neither Nagy’s nor Kádár’s had
calmed it down.
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102 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
There was now a curfew in effect, as well as a general strike.
At dawn on October 25, people came out into the streets again,
to a city that already had the appearance of a battlefield. The
first news of the day was that Colonel Pal Maleter, a six-foot-
six Soviet-trained tank officer, had taken command of the
Kilian barracks and gone over to the insurgents. The next was
that Nagy would speak to the people from Parliament—Nagy’s
prestige, despite his being part of the government that had
called the Russians in, was such that thousands of Hungarians
began to march to Parliament Square to hear him. Russian
tanks, alarmed by the crowd, moved to block the way to Parlia-
ment. As those in the crowd who knew Russian tried to
harangue the tank crews, AVH soldiers stationed on the roof of
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“Arise, Magyars!” 103
the Parliament building opened fire into the crowd. Startled,
the Russian tank crews opened fire too, and the crowd—which
numbered between 30,000 and 50,000—was caught in a vicious
cross fire, which killed between 300 and 500 men, women,
and children. This set off a day of confusion, recrimination, and
further bloodshed. Gerő was expelled—too late—from the
government and the party; Kádár and Nagy both made concil-
iatory speeches (in later years it would be alleged that Nagy was
forced to rewrite his speech at gunpoint, on the orders of
Mikoyan and Suslov); a crowd of demonstrators gathered out-
side the British legation to beg for help from the West and
received the somewhat tepid condolences of the British minis-
ter; and President Eisenhower, nearing the end of his campaign
for a second term, expressed his sympathy for the Hungarians,
who might have been disappointed had they known that in
Washington the Special Committee on Soviet Problems had
debated whether the president should announce a special day of
prayer for them.2
Sympathy and perhaps prayers, it was already beginning to
appear, were all they were likely to get. For years Radio Free
Europe, broadcasting from Munich, had been urging the people
of the “captive nations” to rise against the Russians, and promis-
ing help from the West when they did so. Much as these broad-
casts irritated communist governments, it is doubtful that
anyone else took them all that seriously. America had not come
to the aid of the martyred strikers at Poznan in Poland, nor did
anybody expect it to. Now, despite the fulminations of Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles and the right-wing Republicans
against the Soviet Union, Eisenhower tried to make it as clear
as possible that anyone who was waiting for the appearance of
104 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
American tanks on the Danube to support the insurgents would
be waiting a very long time indeed.
At the same time, events in the Middle East were conspiring
to prevent any meaningful attempt to restrain the Soviet Union.
The British and the French, acting in concert for once, but with
extraordinary (and ill-fated) duplicity, had schemed with the
Israelis to encourage a surprise attack by Israel on Egypt. This
attack would serve as the pretext for an Anglo-French invasion
to “stabilize” the situation in the interests of world peace. Behind
this fig leaf was an old-fashioned nineteenth-century imperialist
plot: the English and French planned to remove President
Nasser of Egypt from power; return the Suez Canal, which he
had nationalized, to Anglo-French ownership; and put a pro-
Western government in power in Cairo.
Alas, neither Anthony Eden nor Guy Mollet was an impe-
rial adventurer in the tradition of Kipling’s heroes; nor were
France and Great Britain great powers anymore. President
Eisenhower, infuriated at having been duped by America’s clos-
est allies, refused to countenance the Anglo-French invasion of
Egypt, and moved to punish the French and the British where it
hurt, cutting off dollar credits and oil supplies. Egypt would be
bombed, and British and French troops would go in; but at the
insistence of the United States these troops were quickly with-
drawn, and any claim Britain and France might still retain to
the position of great powers vanished, along with the careers of
the two statesmen.
That this drama—or farce—was being played out at the
same time as the Hungarian uprising was a tragedy, first of all
because it gave the Soviet Union a moral fig leaf of its own—
why should it be condemned by the West for doing just what
the French and the British were doing in Egypt?—and second
“Arise, Magyars!” 105
because it diverted attention from Budapest to Egypt. Every-
body feared that the Soviet Union might airlift massive num-
bers of troops to Egypt to support President Nasser, or even use
nuclear weapons.
By now it has become second nature on everybody’s part to
deny that American and British intelligence had anything to
do with events in Hungary; but fifty years later there is good
reason to believe that this denial is false. The British had every
reason to encourage a rising behind the Iron Curtain as a way of
keeping the Soviet Union and its army tied down in the streets
of Warsaw or Budapest, as opposed to rushing to the support of
Nasser. One CIA analyst at the time, C. Philip Skardon, in
an excellent monograph on the subject, A Lesson for Our Times:
How America Kept the Peace in the Hungary-Suez Crisis of 1956,
traces in some detail the behind-the-scenes intelligence activity
that preceded the Hungarian Revolution, and concludes from
intercepts that British intelligence (MI6) was deeply impli-
cated in encouraging student groups and intellectuals to revolt,
and in persuading anti-Rákosi members of the party that a
revolt would receive backing from the West. The French and
the Israelis left this side of things to the British, who had
always had good contacts in Hungary, the idea being that the
two crises would occur at the same time, which was exactly what
happened.
Apart from Radio Free Europe, the American intelligence
community was deeply resentful of British attempts to influ-
ence events in Hungary, and appalled by the prospect that the
United States might have to intervene in two armed conflicts,
both in areas where the Soviets’ sensitivity was acute and where
American involvement might easily provoke the Kremlin into
the use of nuclear weapons, with unforeseeable results. Some-
106 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
thing of this attitude was reflected in Eisenhower’s actions—he
simultaneously halted the Israelis, the British, and the French in
their tracks and made it clear to the Soviets that the United
States would not cross the Iron Curtain to support the Hungar-
ian insurgents, thus defusing the most dangerous moment of
the cold war until the Cuban missile crisis.
There is ample reason to believe that without the Suez crisis,
the Hungarian revolt might have had a happier ending. America
could have put greater pressure on Russia than it did, the British
and the French could have joined in usefully, and some kind of
negotiated international settlement might have been reached;
but the fighting in Suez precluded all that, and the Soviet Union
was left free to devote its full military strength to ending the
Hungarians’ bid for independence.
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“Arise, Magyars!” 107
. . .
None of this was obvious on October 26, and the Budapest corre-
spondent of Britain’s communist newspaper The Daily Worker
was accordingly inspired to write a long, truthful account of what
was taking place in Hungary, which, naturally, The Daily Worker
spiked. Fighting had by now spread throughout the country. In
Győr and Magyaróvár, near the Austrian border, frightful massa-
cres took place, carried out by the Russians and the AVH, fol-
lowed inevitably by the ruthless murder of all AVH troops and
agents, many of whom were lynched. In places, the bodies of
AVH men were stripped and hung up from trees; in Budapest
the photographer John Sadovy of Life took a famous series of
pictures of the execution in the street of captured AVH guards.
All over the country, hastily improvised funerals were taking place,
of men, women, and children killed during the fighting. In the
streets, Russian corpses were separated from those of Hungari-
ans. Medical workers sprinkled the bodies with quicklime to
prevent infection, but the corpses of Hungarians usually bore a
small bouquet of flowers on the chest, and sometimes their names,
hand-lettered on a piece of cardboard. The bodies of AVH inform-
ers and troops often had a framed portrait of Stalin or Rákosi on
their chest, to set them apart from Freedom Fighters and civilian
victims of Soviet aggression.
The government’s ability to handle the situation was visibly
deteriorating rapidly—food supplies were erratic, with people
queuing up for bread while fighting was going on around them;
hospitals were filled to overflowing and running short of all
kinds of medications and supplies. The Budapest radio station
was back in the hands of the government and the Russians, but
many other radio stations across the country were in the hands
of the insurgents, so radio news programs broadcast two vehe-
mently opposed views of events.
108 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
October 27 was another day of violent fighting. Budapest’s
broad avenues were littered with burned-out tanks and guns;
buildings smoldered and burned, since firemen were unable to
get through the improvised barricades or roadblocks of tanks;
the pavements were littered with broken glass, debris, rubble,
spent cartridges, and corpses. Nagy, who had been trying to
strike a balance between the demands of the Russians and the
Hungarian hard-liners on one side and those of the insurgents
on the other, finally gave in to the insurgents and sacked most of
the hard-liners from his cabinet, replacing them with more
moderate figures.
On the morning of October 28 Nagy announced further
concessions, to the consternation of Mikoyan, Suslov, and the
Soviet ambassador to Hungary, Yuri Andropov: a general
amnesty for all fighters, the disbanding of the AVH, and the
replacement of the Soviet star on the national flag by the arms
of Kossuth. Although the fighting still continued unabated,
many other events were taking place: the United Nations was at
last debating the Soviet Union’s actions in Hungary; the Yugo-
slavs and the Poles expressed their support of Hungary; and all
over Hungary student groups and insurgents were beginning to
form what amounted to local democracy, and demanding Hun-
gary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and an immediate end
to the Russian occupation.
It may be that Andropov, Mikoyan, and Suslov talked some
sense into Khrushchev, and by the night of October 28 there
were signs that the Russian troops were pulling out of Budapest,
rather than being reinforced. In Moscow, the Central Commit-
tee was in a state of confusion, divided between those who
wanted to support the new Hungarian government and those
who wanted to use force against it. Khrushchev cannily observed,
“Arise, Magyars!” 109
“Politically, this is beneficial for us. The English and French are
in a real mess in Egypt. We shouldn’t get caught in the same
company.” All this of course was on the condition that Hungary
remain within the Warsaw Pact, which was rapidly becoming a
major—and critical—issue.3 On October 29 it became clear
that the insurgents had won, in part because of Moscow’s hesi-
tation to reinforce the Soviet army. Long lines of Soviet tanks
left Budapest and moved south or west, leaving their dead
behind in the streets; an eerie quiet reigned over the city; streets
that had been named after Stalin and other communist figures
were hastily renamed; and the files of the AVH were thrown
open, the torture cells exposed, and the secret files and reports
thrown out into the street in huge piles and set on fire.
Jovial Soviet diplomatic spokesmen all over the world
reported that the crisis was over, that Hungary now had a gov-
ernment with which they could negotiate, that “the firemen had
put the fire out,” and that it was now time to rebuild on new
foundations.
There is an old Russian saying that the bear is never more
dangerous than when he looks friendly, and this would swiftly
prove to be true.4
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6.
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and
Independent Hungary!”
During all this period the news from Hungary produced
an unusual degree of ferment nearly everywhere, and
nowhere more than among young people. At Magdalen Col-
lege, Oxford, however, where I was then an undergraduate,
there was less excitement than one might have expected. In
the first place, there was a long-standing tradition of British
phlegm—it was part of upper-class tradition not to appear to
be too excited about anything. Then too, while eastern Euro-
pean university students have an ancient tradition of revolu-
tionary ferment, both on the left and on the right, Oxford
undergraduates do not as a rule see themselves as manning the
barricades, tommy gun in hand, or seizing the BBC. Finally,
the Suez crisis dominated conversation—it was the great divider
between left and right, even dividing some conservatives from
their own party. In addition, most of the undergraduates were
in the reserves, and expected to be recalled to serve in Egypt
112 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
if things there got sticky. Not a few of my friends were dis-
creetly checking to make sure their uniforms and kit were in
good order, and even I had performed a quick mental inventory
just in case a telegram calling me back arrived from R.A.F.
Uxbridge.
As the days went by, however, my mind turned more and
more toward Hungary. Not that I suffered from any kind of
nostalgia for a place where I had never been, and about which I
had not until now experienced any curiosity; but there was no
denying that if you wanted to be where the action was, Budapest
was the place, not Uxbridge or even Oxford.
I always felt sorry that I had missed the Spanish Civil War—
I was only three when it broke out—perhaps because it played
such a large role in the lives of my father’s friends, starting with
Robert Capa, the war photographer. My father himself had
gone to Spain—not to fight, but to get several Hungarian
friends in the International Brigades out when things turned
bad; and he knew a great many of the Hungarians who had
fought there, including some who returned to Hungary, rather
than to London, New York, or Los Angeles, and later became
members of the communist party. Of course I had read Heming-
way, Orwell, and all the usual literature on the war—at twenty-
three, I was exactly the right age for that kind of adventure,
and here it was, 1,000 miles to the east of Madrid, presenting
itself again twenty years later. I was determined not to miss out
on it.
Michael Maude, who had gone with me to East Germany,
was in readiness for a call-up back to Wellington barracks and
the Foot Guards and declined to go with me; and at first the
only people who shared my enthusiasm for the idea of going to
Budapest were two American friends: Jaquelin T. Robertson
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 113
and Harry Joe Brown, Jr., known to everyone as Coco.
Jack Robertson was a Virginian, wealthy, talented (he would
later become a distinguished architect), and good-looking. He
was the son of the assistant secretary of state and “old China
hand” Walter Robertson. A Yale man, Jack was at Magdalen as
a Rhodes scholar; as an admirer of Generalissmo Chiang Kai-
shek (“the Gitmo,” as Jack always referred to him), General
Douglas MacArthur, Henry Luce, and John Foster Dulles, he
felt it to be his place to serve on the barricades against commu-
nism. Coco Brown, the son of a movie producer on the West
Coast, was the best friend of my old schoolmate Warner LeRoy.
Coco had arrived in Oxford from Stanford and New York City,
and moved into Jack’s rooms, where he slept on a sofa in Jack’s
sitting room. He was so naturally charming, sweet-tempered,
good-humored, and well dressed that everybody, including the
head porter and the dons, assumed he belonged there; but in
fact he was a member of neither the university nor Magdalen
College—he was simply a friend of Jack’s, who had drifted
across the Atlantic in his wake. Occasionally he wore a bor-
rowed academic gown, just to get into the spirit of things. He
seemed exactly the right person to go to Budapest, a figure
straight out of the pages of The Sun also Rises. He seemed to
think so too—anyway, where Jack went, Coco went too, in his
easygoing way.
We talked about it in Bond’s Room, off the stair to the JCS,
where the college elite met for drinks, and over a sherry at eleven
o’clock in the morning we decided it was our duty to take part.
After a couple more of Bond’s sherries, neither of them saw any
problem in going to Budapest. Coco planned to pick up a pro-
fessional sixteen-millimeter movie camera to shoot footage for a
documentary film. I should bring my Leica. They had a few
114 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
things to do in London first, then they would drive via Paris to
Vienna and meet me there at the Sacher Hotel.
The rumor that I might be going to Budapest had spread by
then, and I soon had three new people anxious to go, all Brits,
none of them as well known to me as Jack and Coco. Russell
Taylor was a large, quiet man, of a size and build likely to
impress even the Russians; Christopher Lord was wiry, very
handsome, and debonair; and Roger Cooper was tall and shrewd,
with a wicked sense of humor—and, an important point, the
owner of a car, a brown Volkswagen convertible, aged and rust-
ing but, he assured us, absolutely up for the trip. We had a few
drinks in front of the fireplace in Bond’s Room, and as the
decanter went around between us we rapidly formed a close
friendship.
Taylor and Lord had done their national service in the army,
I recall, Cooper may have done his in the Royal Navy. None of
us doubted that our combined military, air force, and naval
knowledge would come in handy to the Hungarians.
We agreed to meet in London, drive to Vienna, meet up with
Jack and Coco there, then cross the border into Hungary. Since
the newspapers were full of desperate appeals from the Hungar-
ians for medical supplies, we decided that we should carry as
much as we could; and my aunt Alexa, now a very wealthy and
merry widow indeed, agreed to pay for the supplies, while our
family doctor, Tibor Csató, a Hungarian himself, wrote the nec-
essary prescriptions.
When these boxes arrived from Boots Chemists my father
stared at them with undisguised pessimism and sighed. “My
poor boy,” he said, “better you bring them food.” He was glum
about the whole thing, partly because he suspected that Alexa,
whom by now he disliked, had influenced me to go; and partly
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 115
because he had lived through two Hungarian revolutions him-
self—the red one of Béla Kun and the white (counterrevolu-
tionary) one of Admiral Horthy—and had not enjoyed either
experience.
He quite liked my companions, though. As he watched us
pack up the car he remarked that we looked a bit like Balkan
bandits. He had a point, I thought, as I stood looking at them
on the pavement. Christopher Lord wore a “British Warm,”
suede chukka boots, and a high astrakhan fur hat like a cos-
sack’s; Russell Taylor a heavy fur-lined overcoat rather like
that of the bad guy who seduces Lara in Doctor Zhivago; and
Roger Cooper a naval duffel coat and Russian fur hat. I wore
my R.A.F. sheepskin-lined leather flying jacket, a beret, cor-
duroy trousers, and waterproof leather boots—a look made
popular by Monty in World War II. My father went back
inside and came out with two bottles of his best cognac. “You
will need this,” he said, handing them to me together with a
thick wad of fifty-dollar bills, and stood on the pavement
puffing his pipe as we puttered off in the VW toward King’s
Road.
On my way home I had stopped not only at Alexa’s house in
Kensington Palace Gardens to say good-bye, but also at the Ritz
Hotel bar on Piccadilly to meet Graham Greene, an old friend
of my family’s who was anxious to give me a few words of
encouragement. Graham and my father had spent a long time
together in Vienna, making The Third Man, and my father
looked to Graham for advice about my education, with the
result that Graham, who liked young people, eventually became
something of a mentor to me. Unlike my father, Graham was
enthusiastic about my going to Budapest. The one subject on
which he agreed with Winston Churchill was that young men
116 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
should experience and enjoy the sound of bullets (it hardly mat-
tered whose) whistling past their ears. He had invited a chap
from MI6—Graham had worked for “the firm” in West Africa
during the war, and still maintained a shadowy connection with
it—who wanted to meet me to join us, he said. Eventually, a tall,
military-looking gentleman of a certain age in a well-cut suit
and a Brigade of Guards tie turned up, and sat down without
giving his name. Was I taking a camera to Budapest, he wanted
to know? I said I was taking my Leica, yes—the influence of
Bob Capa on my childhood was still strong. Good, the man
from the firm said, just the ticket—I should photograph as
many unit markings on Soviet vehicles as I could. This was the
bread-and-butter of intelligence work—knowing which units
were where, and what they were armed with.
My experience behind the Iron Curtain had already taught
me that there was hardly anything the communists liked less
than a camera in the hands of a Westerner; still, I saw no harm
in agreeing. But how was I to get the film back, I asked?
The man from MI6 leaned close to me, and in a conspirato-
rial voice said, “French letters, old boy. Put two film cartridges in
a french letter, tie up the end, then stick the whole thing up your
bottom. Simple as pie.” He sipped his martini for a moment.
“Helps to lubricate it a bit first, you know. Vaseline, that kind of
thing.”
Graham nodded, either because he was already familiar with
this piece of tradecraft, or because he had just memorized it to
use in one of his novels.
The man from the firm congratulated me on the idea of tak-
ing in medical supplies—perfect cover! I pointed out that they
weren’t really cover—that was the purpose of our journey. He
beamed. Better still! The best cover was always genuine. It
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 117
occurred to me, belatedly, that he knew a surprising amount about
our plans.
His expression turning more serious, the man from the firm
wrote out a telephone number on a cocktail napkin and handed
it to me. “Just in case you run into trouble, call this number,” he
said. I was about to put it in my pocket, but he shook his head. I
should memorize it, he advised. I stared at it for a while—long
enough to commit it to memory, I hoped—and then handed it
back. He unfolded the cocktail napkin, took out a silver ciga-
rette lighter, and set fire to it, causing a certain amount of con-
sternation at the other tables and among the staff. He carefully
crushed the ashes in the ashtray and dusted off his fingers. I
must use it only in a real emergency, mind, he warned me. “Life
or death, eh?”
I nodded, not at all sure now that I remembered the number
at all, and wondering what kind of life-or-death situation would
give me a chance to make a telephone call.
Graham and I followed him out onto Piccadilly, where he
turned right and set off at a brisk pace, swinging his umbrella, a
neat figure in a belted Burberry and a bowler hat. He was on his
way back to the office, I guessed, the anonymous redbrick Vic-
torian building on Shaftesbury Avenue that housed MI6 and
was supposed to be top secret, except that London taxi drivers
invariably pointed it out to tourists.
“You’ll be all right, now” Graham said, with complete con-
viction. “I told your father—they always look after their own.”
The only other visit I paid was to say good-bye to Tracy Reed,
Carol Reed’s stepdaughter, in King’s Road. I had strong feelings
about her, which were not, I regret to say, fully reciprocated; but
I discovered, as so many have before me, that every woman has
a soft spot for an anticipatory hero on his way to war.
118 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
All that night, we drove hard, and in extreme discomfort,
crossing to Belgium on the ferry and driving in shifts from there
southwest. Between the bulk of Russell Taylor and the medical
supplies, the little car was as crowded as a midget submarine;
and like all Volkswagens of that era it was stiffly sprung and
noisy. Thanks to the combined genius of Albert Speer and Dr.
Porsche the gas stations on the autobahn were spaced at intervals
determined by the range of a Volkswagen with a full tank—the
car and the highways were, in fact, a single system, which is why
early VWs had no gas gauge—and we stopped at each station,
filled up, had a cup of coffee and a Steinhäger, and then drove
on numbly through the rain.
In the early evening of October 29 we pulled up at the Sacher
Hotel and stumbled into the lobby, cramped, stiff, and hungover.
The concierge recognized me from the days when I had stayed
here with my father when he was making The Third Man, over
eight years ago; but then a concierge, I reminded myself, is
paid—or tipped—precisely for his ability to remember faces.
His expression was apologetic. It was a pleasure to welcome
Herr Vincent Korda’s son back to the Sacher, but he regretted
that he had received a message from my friends, who were still
in Paris and unable to join me. He read from the message pad: I
should go on to Hungary without them.
I was not flabbergasted. Coco was mercurial. Once he reached
Paris, the idea of going on to Budapest might easily seem to him
less attractive—Paris has that effect on Americans. And I
thought it very likely that the moment Jack’s father heard about
the idea, he had put his foot down. The idea of the son of the
American assistant secretary of state being tried or jailed in
Hungary was simply unthinkable—just the kind of embarrass-
ment that President Eisenhower didn’t want or need. I had been
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 119
looking forward to a two-car convoy consisting of Roger’s VW
and Jack’s more comfortable MG sedan, but we would just have
to carry on, squeezed in like sardines.
The concierge expressed concern. Was Herr Korda truly
planning to go to Budapest? I said I was, yes. Normally, of
course, he said apologetically, he would call ahead and make
a hotel reservation for us there—the Gellért Hotel was not
too bad, though not like the old days, of course—but at pres-
ent the telephone lines were unreliable. I briefly wondered
which “old days” he was referring to, but I suppressed the
thought. He had heard that some of the best hotels had been
damaged in the fighting. If all else failed, we should try the
old Astoria Hotel, which was now called the Red Star, and
which used to be very comfortable. As for restaurants . . . He
shrugged. Who could say? We must expect things to be very
bad there, from the point de vue gastronomique. I explained
that we were on a mission of mercy, rather than tourism or
gastronomy. “Ach so,” he said briskly, snapping his fingers for
the porters to take our luggage.
We ate a stupendous meal of soup, Wiener schnitzel, and
the famous Sacher torte—after all, who knew when we would
dine like this again?—drank several bottles of wine, and spent a
quiet night. In the morning, after an excellent breakfast, we
followed my father’s advice and bought a couple of big ham-
pers of delicatessen—salamis, smoked hams, sausages, cheeses,
kirsch, and schnopps. It was my father’s firm belief that in wars
and revolutions you needed as much food as you could carry,
both to eat and to give away in emergencies; and, as usual, he
was right.
At the last moment, as we were trying to pack all this into
the car, the concierge rushed out, cradling something in his
120 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
arms. It turned out to be the large Union Jack that had been
flying from above the hotel entrance, alongside the Stars and
Stripes, the French flag, and the Austrian flag. With the help
of the doorman, he tied it over the roof of the VW. It covered
practically the whole car. “In case of strafing,” he explained,
pointing toward the cold, gray sky, as if Russian fighter planes
might appear there at any moment; when I offered to tip him,
he held up his hand with great dignity, perhaps the first time
that the concierge of a major hotel has ever refused a tip. “Good
luck,” he said formally. “Bring it back when you return.” He, the
doorman, and the bellboy stood to attention and saluted as we
left, puttering down the Ringstrasse in search of the highway to
Budapest, feeling, at least in my case, every inch the hero.
Journey to a Revolution
The road between Vienna and Budapest is not one to inspire
awe, especially in the early morning of a cold, wet, late-autumn
day. At this point on the map, Hitler and Speer apparently lost
interest in building autobahns, so the road was narrow, slippery,
and lined with bare trees, and the countryside flat and shrouded
in mist. The heater in the VW had given up the ghost—even
when working, it was either hot as a furnace or freezing cold,
nothing in between—so we kept ourselves warm with a couple
of bottles of kirsch. There was not much in the way of traffic—
in fact, for long periods of time ours was the only car on the
road. Eventually, we arrived at the Austrian border post, where
the guards stared at our passports incredulously. “You’re going
into Hungary?” the senior one asked.
We told him we were. Was that a problem? He rolled his
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 121
eyes. “Not for me,” he said. “For you, maybe. Bad things are hap-
pening over there, you know.”
“That’s why we’re going.”
He shook his head. “A lot of people are trying to get out,
you know. Not many people want go in.” He stamped our
passports neatly—the tradition of exactitude in the Austrian
civil service never dies, as if Emperor Franz Josef ’s portrait were
still hanging on the wall behind the desk—and handed them
back to us. “In my opinion,” he said gravely, “the world would
be a better place if people stayed in their own country and
minded their own business, na? Gute Reise, meine Herren.” He
waved his hand, and a guard raised the red-and-white pole to
let us through. They all stood and stared at us as we drove down
the road, no doubt saying to each other, “All the English are
crazy.”
The border had been heavily fortified with tank traps and
barbed wire on the Hungarian side—this, after all, was the Iron
Curtain, right here, where it was not a metaphor but real—but it
was now unguarded. No border guards or troops were in sight.
We pulled into the guard post, the roof of which was festooned
with Hungarian flags from which the Soviet star had been cut
out with blunt scissors or a knife, leaving a ragged hole in the
middle. Inside the guard post a man sat behind the desk, wear-
ing a leather jacket, a green uniform cap from which the badge
had been torn, and a three-day growth of beard. On the desk in
front of him was a bottle with no label, the contents of which
looked suspiciously like gasoline. On the other hand, it might
not be gasoline—he looked drunk.
He stared out the window moodily at the Union Jack tied to
the roof of the car. “More English journalists?” he asked. “We
already have enough.”
122 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
“We’re English, yes,” I said, holding out our passports, “but
not journalists. We’ve come to deliver medical supplies to the
hospital in Budapest.”
He raised an eyebrow unsteadily. “No kidding? American
cigarettes would be better.” He flicked through our passports.
“Korda? The movie producer is your dad?”
“My uncle.”
“Son of a bitch! This calls for a drink.” He uncorked the bot-
tle, wiped the neck on his sleeve, and passed it to us. I took a
swig. It tasted a bit like gasoline, but with a sweet, fruity after-
taste, and produced instant paralysis of the lips and unsteadiness
of the legs.
“Barack,” he explained. “Homemade peach brandy.” After
each of us had taken a swallow he took the bottle back, took a
heroic gulp from it, and put the cork back in. “It’s the national
drink,” he explained. We expressed our admiration for it, so he
passed the bottle around again. He had trouble with his pass-
port stamp, partly because his hands were shaking, partly because
somebody had cut the communist emblems out of it with a pen-
knife, so it left a gluey mess of ink on our passports. “There’s
supposed to be a fee, but fuck it.” He drew a thick line across the
visa with a blunt pencil, and wrote “Gratis.”
As we went back to the car, he called out, “English! Go care-
ful, yes?”
“Careful of the Russians? Quite.”
“Fuck the Russians—they’re miles away. They’re going home.
Be careful of everybody. When you go through Győr be extra
careful—there are some very bad guys in Győr.”
He was wrong about the Russians. A couple of miles down the
road we came around a bend and braked hard. Coming directly
toward us, right down the middle of the road, was a long file of
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 123
Russian T-55 tanks. They did not slow down, so we pulled off the
road and got out. As they started to pass us, thundering and belch-
ing smoke, I took out my Leica and pointed it at the closest
tank—a perfect opportunity to get a photograph of unit flashes
for MI6, I thought. Before I could take the picture, the gunner,
leaning out of his hatch on top of the turret, slowly cocked his big
12.7-millimeter machine gun—even above the noise of the tanks
I could hear the distinct click-clack — and swung the gun to aim
directly at me, as the whole column ground to a halt. He had a
leather helmet with earflaps, and the blackest, thickest eyebrows I
had ever seen on a person. The eyes beneath them were flinty.
Very slowly I let the camera down on my chest and held my
hands up. Right then and there I decided that MI6 was going to
have to do without my photographs.
An officer appeared from a Russian jeep and strode over to
us, his hand on his pistol holster. He wore a long greatcoat,
down to the heels of his boots, a Sam Browne belt, and gold
shoulder boards. His face was fixed in a scowl. He glanced at our
Union Jack with distaste. “Angliskiye?” he asked.
We nodded and handed him our passports, which he thumbed
through without taking off his gloves.
“Vy kuda?” (“Where are you going?”) he asked.
“To Budapest,” I explained.
He raised an eyebrow. “You speak Russian?”
I nodded.
“Pochemu?” (“Why?”)
I did not think it was a good moment to bring up the subject
of the Royal Air Force language course. “To read Pushkin in the
original,” I said.
He handed back the passports. “Fuck Pushkin.” He looked
into the car and saw the boxes. “What’s in those?”
124 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
Medical supplies for the Budapest hospitals, we explained.
We were on a humanitarian mission.
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re bringing medical supplies to
these sons of bitches? Fuck their mothers.”
He pointed his finger at me. “You, the Pushkin lover. No
more fucking photographs, you understand?” Then, in a more
friendly tone: “Be careful going through Győr, English. There
are very bad people there.”
He waved us on, and went back to the jeep. The machine
gunner grinned and gave us the finger as we drove past him on
the verge of the road.
We briefly contemplated not going through Győr, but a look
at the road map the concierge at Sacher’s had given us showed
that this was almost impossible. Besides, we needed gas, and of
course the Hungarian road system, such as it was, had never
been designed with civilian traffic in mind. Since there were
hardly any private cars, there was no need for gas stations, and
the few that existed were in the cities. Going through Győr
seemed a better bet than trying to get around it on doubtful
roads and running out of gas in the middle of nowhere.
Győr, when we got to it, was singularly drab and depressing,
an eastern European industrial city, grim, gray, sooty, and appar-
ently deserted. The broad, straight avenues* so typical of Haps-
burg city planning were empty, except for a few burned-out
trams and trucks; the shops were shuttered. Small bunches of
flowers or a patch of white lime marked places where people
*Such avenues and boulevards had first been developed by Baron Haussmann for Napoléon III, during the rebuilding of Paris, because they offered a good field of fire for artillery in case of revolutions; other European monarchs quickly imitated them. The Russians took full advantage of this example of city planning in 1956.
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 125
had been shot, but the bodies had been carried away. It was
lunchtime, and after a morning of drinking kirsch and barack we
were hungry, so we pulled up at what seemed to be the only
hotel, in front of which were parked a lot of dusty Russian-
made cars, and went in. The desk was empty, but to the right of
it was the entrance to a kind of Bierstube, part bar, part restau-
rant, in a kind of kitschy countrified German style—wood pan-
eling, simple furniture, antlers, low ceilings. It was very crowded,
and everybody was smoking Hungarian cigarettes, so there was
a kind of low fog of vile-smelling smoke, coupled with the
strong smells of damp wool, peach brandy, and paprika. The
people in the room stopped what they were doing and stared at
us, and it came to my attention that many of them were armed.
Most of the men were swarthy, robust fellows, wearing shiny
ankle-length black leather trench coats, with a submachine gun
hanging from the back of their chairs, or a pistol on the table in
front of them. The women were blond, heavily made up, wore
black berets, and showed a lot of leg in high heels and stockings.
They did not look like student revolutionaries, or exude a feel-
ing of idealism.
“What do they look like to you?” Christopher asked me.
“Thugs?”
“Quite. I imagine they’re AVH men and their girlfriends
running for their lives. I suppose they’re the bad guys everybody
was warning us about.”
I supposed so too, but there was no point in backing out, so
we sat down at the only empty table and ordered beers. Russell
asked to see a menu, but that request produced a round of
laughter, once it had been translated. There was no choice of
food. A stout waitress in peasant costume brought us each a
bowl of goulash and a huge chunk of black bread from the
126 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
kitchen. The goulash wasn’t bad, either—hot, spicy, and
filling.
One of the men in black leather got up, slung his tommy gun
over his shoulder, and came creaking over to our table. “Ameri-
cans?” he asked.
We explained that we were English. His expression regis-
tered disappointment. In those days people wanted dollars, not
pounds.
“Journalists? We don’t need no more journalists.”
We explained about our mission of mercy.
He was incredulous. “You’re going to give this stuff away?
You could sell it for a lot of money in Budapest. Or here.”
“We’re not selling, we’re buying. We need gas.”
A crafty look came over his face. “You have dollars?”
I thought for a moment. It took only the smallest amount of
survival instinct to tell me that revealing we had dollars to a
roomful of fleeing AVH officers and their mistresses was like
begging to be robbed at gunpoint and perhaps shot. I went out
to the car, brought back my father’s two bottles of brandy, and
put them on the table. Our friend picked them up and looked at
the labels. “French? Ten liters of gas.”
“Twenty.”
He shrugged. “OK.” He went out and came back with two of
the ubiquitous jerricans that the Germans had used for carrying
fuel during the war. That was war—and revolution—for you.
The bottles had probably cost ten pounds apiece at Justerini and
Brooks, and we had just exchanged them for twenty liters of gas.
When things get bad enough men will give a gold watch for a
loaf of bread, and women their virtue. War and revolution teach
you the relativity of values pretty quickly.
Christopher opened up the jerricans and sniffed at the con-
tents. “They could be full of water,” he whispered, revealing a
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 127
hitherto unsuspected shrewdness that was to pay dividends in
the days ahead.
We paid for our meal with Austrian schillings, and then I
went in search of a toilet before we set out for Budapest. The
hotel was empty—not a neutral emptiness so much as a threaten-
ing one, a feeling with which I was to become familiar in the next
few days. The silence here was like the breath we all draw before
something we know will be painful happens—the dentist’s drill,
the awful moment of truth, the act of unkindness that can’t be put
off a moment longer. The hotel was like that, its empty corridors
more frightening than a roomful of armed men on the run. Where
had the staff gone, I wondered. I opened a couple of doors, but
they were closets—I should have asked what the Hungarian was
for “men’s room”—then saw one that had a crude painting of a
prancing stallion on it, virtually a universal symbol from here to
Las Vegas.
The door was stiff, but I pushed it hard. It was the men’s
toilet all right; I could see a sink and a urinal in the dim light
from a partly opened window. I pushed harder, but the door
was stuck. Then I saw why. My eyes quickly took in the soles
of a pair of heavy, well-polished boots, the kind of thing tour-
ists used to wear for hiking, a leather coat, and a gloved hand.
There appeared to be blood on the tiled floor—not a lot, but
enough. I was reluctant to step in it. I went to the next door
down—with a painting of a horse with a long, flowing mane,
and doubtless the Hungarian word for “fillies”—and went there
instead. The toilet was blocked and there was filthy water on the
floor, but at least there was no corpse. It occured to me then and
since that I might have imagined the whole thing, but I was not
tempted to go back and check.
I decided not to tell the others what I had seen—it could
128 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
only diminish their spirits—but although I had given up
smoking a year or so ago, I took a cigarette from Christopher
and lit up.
A few hundred yards down from the hotel was the govern-
ment-owned gas station. A few men in black leather coats, like
our friends from the pub, were filling jerricans from the one
pump, some without taking the lit cigarette out of their mouth—
with so many ways to die, ordinary risks don’t seem to matter
anymore. There was a body lying in the street, not far from the
gas pump.
I took a long drag on my cigarette—I would smoke like a
chimney for the rest of our time in Hungary—and thanked the
stars that we had thought to pack the odd spaces in the car with
cartons of Senior Service.
Suddenly we seemed to be a long way from home.
That was October 30. Though we didn’t know it, events were
moving rapidly even as we approached Budapest.1 The day
before, the Russians had agreed to withdraw their troops from
Budapest on the condition that a government in which they had
confidence was in power. No less a personage than Marshal
Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin, had announced in Moscow
that the Soviet Union had confidence in Nagy’s government,
and throughout October 29 units of the Red Army began mov-
ing out of the capital and heading east, toward the Soviet Union,
to demonstrate this. (Of course, we had seen Soviet tanks mov-
ing west, toward the border, but we were in no position to tell
anybody as we drove toward Budapest.)
On October 30 Nagy declared the end of the one-party state,
reestablished democratic government based on elections, and
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 129
permitted noncommunist political parties to resume their
existence. Even more dramatically, Nagy released Cardinal
József Mindszenty from the prison where he had been held
since 1948. The cardinal returned to his archdiocese in Buda
amid scenes of enormous emotion, blessing the crowds from an
armored car.
In the meantime, throughout October 30, widespread mas-
sacres of AVH officers and men were taking place—the photog-
rapher John Sadovy of Life captured one such incident outside
the headquarters of the communist party of Budapest, which
ended with dozens shot at point-blank range and the half-naked
body of one of the officers strung up from a tree, doused with
gasoline, and set on fire. Similar scenes of violence were taking
place all over the city, as Hungarians unleashed their rage against
the hated communist secret police. In the prime minister’s office
Nagy pleaded for an end to the violence, well aware of how it
was infuriating Mikoyan, Suslov, and the Soviet generals, but
there was no stopping it. Nearly a decade of political cruelty,
repression, and murder was bearing fruit.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the Israelis had already
attacked the Egyptians in the Sinai—the pretext for the coming
Anglo-French assault—and in Cyprus the British and French
paratroopers were already assembled, waiting for the order to
go, while in eastern Hungary the first units of the Red Army
were crossing the Hungarian frontier in huge numbers.
Unconscious of any of these events, we arrived in Budapest
that afternoon, Roger at the wheel, Russell sitting beside him,
and Christopher and I in the backseat, with a street map of the
unfamiliar city unfolded on our laps. Our Union Jack produced
sporadic applause from people on the street, who clearly sup-
posed we were the forerunners of a vast Anglo-American force.
130 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
As we made our way through the city—which resembles a
hillier Paris, divided by the Danube instead of the Seine, but
with the same huge, ornate public buildings, Third Republic
apartment buildings, and wide tree-lined boulevards—toward
the center, the signs of fighting became more evident. On all
sides there were blackened and burned-out tanks and artillery
pieces. Many bodies still lay where they had fallen, sprinkled
with lime if they were Russian, their heavy greatcoats spread out
as if they were making snow angels, or covered with small bou-
quets of flowers if they were Hungarian. The corpses of women
were particularly sad, skirts hiked higher than they would have
been in life, slips and stockings showing, as if their privacy had
somehow been invaded by death. Their handbags or string
shopping bags often lay beside them—proof that the determi-
nation to stand in line for bread and groceries even when fight-
ing was going on, so often praised by Western newsmen, was
sometimes fatal. The litter of death and destruction was scat-
tered all over the streets and pavements around them, much of it
paper—the dead always appear to be carrying more paper than
the living—identity cards, letters, family photographs, and shop-
ping lists mixed with the burned and blackened bits and pieces
from the bonfires of communist books, lithographs of Stalin
and Rákosi, and communist party newspapers.
One had to drive a slalom course around improvised barri-
cades of trams and buses shredded by artillery, interlaced with
torn, twisted tram rails and ornamental fencing from the
parks. The streets were littered with broken glass, debris, rubble,
and spent cartridge cases—one proceeded slowly to avoid driv-
ing over a corpse, or bursting a tire on shards of armor from
damaged tanks or unexploded artillery shells. Some of the
tanks were still burning, filling the air with dense diesel fumes
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 131
and the smell of charred human bodies. If one looked—though
one tried hard not to look—the crisp, blackened bodies of tank
crews and gunners hung out of open hatches, clawlike hands
still reaching for safety, or perhaps mercy. The air was cold and
almost unbreathable: a mixture of brick dust, cordite, and the
stench of death that brought tears to one’s eyes. Many people on
the street held a handkerchief to their nose, and with good
reason—we were soon coughing, hacking, and chain-smoking
ourselves.
Here and there a tank had brewed, and the resulting explo-
sion, as the ammunition stored in the turret went off, had blown
the turret and the gun fifty yards or more away from the hull—
something to give one pause, considering that a T-55 tank tur-
ret and its gun probably weighed ten or fifteen tons, and
contained the tank commander, the gunner, and the loader. The
turrets lay on the cobblestones like huge crushed beetles. At first
glance all this seemed to indicate a splendid victory for the
insurgents, but of course a certain number of the tanks and artil-
lery pieces were no doubt Hungarian—losses had been high on
both sides—and there was a singular absence of jubilation
among the people on the street.
From time to time we stopped to ask directions for the
Second Medical Clinic—Tibor Csató had instructed us to deliver
the medical supplies to an old colleague, Professor Hajnal,
director of the clinic. Almost everybody offered us a drink while
explaining how to get there, and we felt obliged, out of polite-
ness, to accept. We drank an awful lot of barack, and quite a few
things that tasted even stranger than that. Most people asked if
there were more of us on the way, a question we answered as
evasively as we could. Our popularity was such that we felt vaguely
guilty. We were handed flowers, bottles of liquor, souvenirs—
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134 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
Soviet cap badges and metal fragments from Stalin’s statue—
and pieces of paper with the names and addresses of relatives
in Cleveland or Chicago. We passed back English cigarettes
and salami and ham from our hamper. By the time we drew up
under the porte cochere of the hospital, a vast grim pile in the
most florid nineteenth-century Hapsburg municipal style, we
had gathered a crowd of well-wishers, who explained our mis-
sion to the hospital staff. A stern but attractive young woman
in a white coat splashed with blood agreed to take us to the
director.
The elevators were not working, so, carrying our cartons, we
followed her up the enormous ornamental marble stairway to
the second floor, and through a pair of double doors into a long
corridor lit only by daylight filtering through gray frosted win-
dows. Here, there was plenty to attract the eye, until you learned
not to look. The hospital was so full that many surgical cases
had been left in the corridor, to be cared for by the patient
nurses and the exhausted medical students. Although there was
a shortage of anesthetics and painkillers, the wounded were
mostly quiet. The wounded children were the hardest to look at,
their big eyes following us as we trudged down the corridor past
their beds.
Our guide knocked on a big door and showed us into the
director’s office. It was big—two walls were filled with medical
books and one with framed diplomas. Professor Hajnal sat
behind a massive desk, a small, intense man, with deep rings
under his eyes, wearing a starched white coat and a stethoscope
around his neck. He rose when we came in, and shook our hands
with enormous formality and dignity after we had explained
how we came to be here. “My old friend Tibor Csató,” he said
with a smile. “But this is very kind of you, to come all this way,
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 135
at a time like this!” He looked at our cartons. “This is the first
help we have had from the West, you know. Some of my young
people thought there would be big Red Cross convoys from
Vienna, but I was less confident.” He shrugged. His English was
heavily accented, but quite good. “Unfortunately, we are on the
Danube, not the Suez Canal, eh?”
We had brought along a typed inventory of what was in the
cartons, prepared by Boots, and Professor Hajnal looked it over
quickly. “Good,” he said, “very good. We can use all this, thank
you. We are short of everything.” He went to the window and
looked out, silent for a moment. It was growing dark already,
and seemed all the darker for the absence of streetlamps. Elec-
tricity was a problem. In the distance there were occasional
shots. He sighed, then turned around briskly to face us. “It’s a
nasty business out there, eh? And I think it’s not over yet, what-
ever people say.” He sat down at his desk and looked at us sternly
for a moment. “Now you have delivered the medical supplies,
what do you propose to do?”
Christopher supposed we would stay on and make ourselves
useful.
Hajnal shook his head wearily. “Useful? Doing what, please?”
We had a car, Roger pointed out. We could help bring the
wounded to the hospital. At the moment, we had a British flag
on it, but perhaps we could change it for a Red Cross flag
instead?
“No,” the professor said. “You are much better off as you are.
The Russians often shoot at ambulances, you know. They might
not shoot at the British flag, who knows? Well, you’re young,
you’ll find something to do. But let me give you this.”
He put a sheet of paper on his blotter, unscrewed his fountain
pen, and in a neat, clear hand that exactly resembled my father’s (it
136 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
must have been what was taught in Hungarian schools) wrote,
on one side in Hungarian, on the other in English:
To whom it may concern
I hereby testify that Mr. R. Cooper, Mr. M. Korda,
Mr. C. Lord and Mr. R. Taylor have today delivered
to the IInd Medical Clinic (Budapest) 1000 million
units of penicillin. We are very grateful to them for
their generous present and for their courage in bring-
ing it in these troubled times to Budapest, which help
our patients and wounded.
He read it over, stamped it with an ink stamp and signed it
on both sides, then folded it in four carefully, slipped it into an
envelope, and gave it to me. “I hope it is useful,” he said. “Unfor-
tunately, I don’t know Russian, but usually they have a great
respect for official pieces of paper even if they can’t read them.
They love ink stamps, you know. Russia doesn’t run on oil or
coal—it runs on ink. Good luck to you.”
The stern young woman led us back to our car. We asked for
directions to the Red Star Hotel, on Kossuth Lajos Utca, and
she did a little sketch for us in her notebook, tore the page out,
and gave it to Christopher. “Be careful,” she said.
“I thought the Russians had gone?” Christopher said. He
had the kind of good looks that made all the young women we
met talk to him as if he were our leader or spokesman. It was an
interesting thing to watch, though a little depressing.
“The Russians, maybe, but there are barricades, patrols. Peo-
ple shoot first, ask questions later, yes?”
“Nice girl,” Russell said as we bundled ourselves back up in
the car. “Shame we didn’t ask her to join us for dinner.”
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138 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
The trip to the hotel in the dark was an alarming experi-
ence. There were indeed plenty of barricades, and also plenty
of armed patrols manning them, and at every one we were
flagged down and stopped. Civilians stuck their heads, and
very often their weapons, into the car and demanded to see
our papers, punctuating their requests by clicking the safety
catch of their weapon off and on repeatedly. “Bloody poor fire
discipline,” Christopher remarked, with sound professional
judgment—fire discipline was not the rebels’ strong point, and
from all over the city you could hear the occasional shot, or a
short burst of submachine-gun fire, as they emphasized their
demands for identification. It was not a lot of shooting, as
these things go, but it was enough to keep your foot close to
the brake pedal and your British passport in your hand. Our
flag brought us a lot of offers to share a drink, which we felt
obliged to accept, but it also brought a certain amount of hos-
tility. Where were the British and the Americans? Why had
they not supported the revolution? What the fuck were we
doing in Egypt? We took to saying, “Plenty more of us on the
way,” in a cheerful tone of voice. “Keeps their morale up,”
Roger remarked.
Russell sat in the back reading the Baedecker’s guide to
Hungary I had taken from my father’s bookshelves (and which
is still in my possession) with the help of a flashlight. “The
Astoria Hotel gets a good rating,” he said. “The restaurant
rates a star too. Eszterházy rostelyos is rather a specialty, it says
here. Beef roasted with onions, tomatoes, and paprika—doesn’t
sound bad, does it? They do amazing things with lake fish too,
apparently.”
“What year is that guidebook?” Christopher asked.
Russell looked at the copyright page. “Nineteen twelve.”
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 139
Eventually we found Kossuth Lajos Utca, and the hotel. The
red stars had been taken down, but there had been no time to
make new signs. It was large, in the European tradition of hôtels
de luxe, but the grandeur was faded now, and the white-and-gold
lobby, with its huge chandeliers, looked uncared for. The con-
cierge took one look at us and shook his head. “We are full up
with British journalists, meine Herren. I haven’t a room to spare.”
This was my specialty. I put one of my father’s fifty-dollar
bills inside my passport and handed it to him. He pocketed the
bill and examined the passport, and his expression changed
instantly. “Korda!” he said, giving the name its full Hungarian
pronunciation. “Not the son of Sir Alexander?”
“His nephew. My father is Korda Vince.”
“Ah, the régisseur. I admired so much his sets for The Private
Life of Henry VIII. I had the honor of serving your uncle when
he stayed in the hotel in 1918, with his beautiful wife Maria
Corda. . . . They had the best suite in the hotel.” He sighed,
looking around the lobby. “Things aren’t the same these days, of
course. But I can give you gentlemen a comfortable room. For
how long will you be staying?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“For some time, I think. I hear the border is closed.”
“Is the restaurant open?” Russell asked.
“Alas, at present, no, but we can serve you sandwiches in
the bar.”
Under the communists, the Red Star Hotel had been the place
where Western businessmen and journalists stayed, so the rooms
were comfortable and clean, and the bathroom was impressive by
any standards. Of course it had suited the government to put for-
eigners here, since, as we would be shown tomorrow, every room
was wired for sound, and there was a big room in the basement,
140 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
equipped with tape recorders, where the AVH could record
every word that was spoken. An AVH guard at the door had
discouraged Hungarians from entering and meeting foreigners.
We put our luggage in the suite and went downstairs to the
bar, which was full and humming. A gypsy orchestra played.
Once again, as in Győr, the room fell silent as we entered, but
this time the people staring at us were unarmed and spoke
English—they were all British journalists. We sat down and
ordered drinks and sandwiches, and for a moment were treated
like celebrities. We were, after all, news, not big news, but still
worth a story. “Oxford Students Arrive in Budapest,” “Film Pro-
ducer’s Nephew and Pals Join Budapest Rebels,” “British Stu-
dents in Race against Time to Deliver Medical Supplies”—we
would get a brief and largely erroneous story in most of the dai-
lies tomorrow morning, and then be eclipsed by larger events.
We were joined by an attractive woman and her husband.
Martha Dalrymple* was a foreign correspondent for the Man-
chester Guardian, her husband Ian a reporter for the more sensa-
tional Daily Express 2. Martha was small, shrewd, well informed,
and kind; she wrote long, thoughtful stories full of facts and his-
tory. Ian was big, bluff, florid, and hearty, a Fleet Street man to
the bone, interested only in the kind of scoops the Express and
its competitors thrived on: “Brighton Bathing Beauty’s Pauper
Funeral” or “West End Sex Club Scandal—Peer Denies All.”
How they managed to get along together was hard to under-
stand, but somehow they did; he would go on to a distinguished
career and a knighthood, while she became a hugely successful
writer of internationally best-selling murder mysteries, one of
* I have changed the names of journalists, diplomats, and Freedom Fighters to protect their privacy.
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 141
which would be set in the Hungarian Revolution, with charac-
ters very much like ourselves in it. No real writer ever wastes
anything, as Graham Greene liked to say.
Once Ian had pigeonholed us as a small story, he could be
friendly enough, though he was like all journalists: anything you
unguardedly said in his hearing could—and would—be used
against you. “Not bad sandwiches,” he said. “Let’s have the chap
bring us another big plate of them, and a bottle of wine, shall
we? Or rather, two bottles.”
This seemed like a jolly good idea, and we sat back and chat-
ted about events. Ian, naturally, knew the sensational side of
things, or at any rate the things which might seem sensational
to a reader of the Express—our brief fame, he told us, was about
to be eclipsed by the arrival of Judy Cripps, the daughter of for-
mer labour chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps
(Churchill’s bugbear, whom he usually called “Sir Stifford
Crapps”). “Ex–Cabinet Minister’s Beautiful Daughter Joins
Freedom Fighters” would certainly trump our story, Ian
thought.
“I say,” Christopher protested, “I know Judy. She’s not what
I’d call a beauty.”
Ian dismissed this with a wave of the hand. “She will be for
the readers of the Daily Express,” he said. “We can’t call her
‘plain,’ can we? Anyway, I hear that at Oxford she’s described as
a raven-haired beauty who gives wild parties.”
“That’s Sarah Rothschild.”
“I bow to your superior knowledge.”
Ian went off to the loo, stopping to say hello to fellow Fleet
Streeters on his way back—Harry of the Times, Jack of the Tele-
graph, what’s-his-name of the Mail, chap from the Mirror, old
Bodkin from the Sketch—but when he sat down his rosy face
142 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
was grave. I wondered if there had been a dead body in the
gents’, but apparently not. He lit a cigarette and took a deep
puff. “I say, bad news on the wireless, chums. We and the Frogs
have just issued an ultimatum to the Gyppos and the Jews. Stop
fighting, or we come in to protect the canal. We’re all at the
wrong party. It looks very much as if the real show is going to be
at Port Said, not here. We’re going to be ‘below the fold,’ as the
Yanks say.” He gave us an appraising stare. “I shouldn’t wonder if
you chaps were court-martialed as deserters when you get
home.”
The same thing had occurred to us.
“I don’t think we’re at the wrong party at all,” Martha said,
but I could see that as a professional, she knew her husband was
right.
The waiter arrived with the sandwiches and the wine, which
wasn’t at all bad. I talked to Martha Dalrymple, who seemed to
know everything and everyone in Budapest. She thought that
Nagy—whom of course she had interviewed—was drifting at
the mercy of events, and would probably be replaced by Kádár,
who had once been his nemesis. In her opinion, the Russians
would make their move soon, but not before Mikoyan and
Suslov had gone home to Moscow—that was the event to watch
out for. She had talked to Colonel Pal Maleter, who told her
that there were now more Russian troops and tanks in the coun-
try than before, and of higher quality, and that nobody in the
government wanted to believe it. We should be very careful, she
warned—things could get very rough. The news from London
wouldn’t help matters—the world’s attention would be focused
on Egypt, not on Hungary.
Rougher than before, I asked? Oh, yes, she said, much, much
rougher. And then there was Suez. . . . She sighed. We didn’t
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 143
know what was going to happen here yet, but it was already yes-
terday’s news in London.
We finished the wine, ordered another couple of bottles, then
went upstairs to bed, and slept like so many logs.
In the morning, we met a “delegation” of students, bringing us the
greetings of the Budapest student associations. They seemed to
imagine that we in some way represented the British student
movement, and that we were here as “observers” on behalf of
hundreds of thousands of aroused British students.
We rather bashfully accepted their greetings—it would have
been rude to tell them that we represented nobody but ourselves.
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144 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
Besides, the “continental” idea of a student is very different from
ours. The Hungarian students were organized into communist
groups and cells, and when they turned against the regime they
naturally retained their organizations—they simply reversed
their ideology, as it were. They had been among the first to
demand changes from the government, and also among the first
to take up arms against it. Students had led the Hungarian ris-
ing of 1848 too—the militancy of student groups was a fact of
life in European politics, as the French government would redis-
cover to its cost in 1968. Students were politically informed and
active; they took themselves seriously and expected to be taken
seriously—they had, in fact, just contributed heavily to bringing
down a Stalinist government in Hungary and to defeating the
Russian army in the streets of Budapest. Explaining to them
that undergraduates at Oxford had no political influence at all
and were taken seriously by nobody was difficult, and seemed, in
the circumstances, a tactless exercise.
Nor, of course, could any of the four of us have spoken for
students at “redbrick” universities. All we knew about was Oxford,
and only the part of Oxford that consisted of upper-middle-
income (and upper-middle-class) public school boys. It is possi-
ble that there were undergraduates at Oxford meeting to protest
the Soviet attack on the students and workers of Budapest, or the
Anglo-French threat to attack to Egypt, but nobody we knew
was likely to be doing so; nor would Anthony Eden be sitting at
his desk at 10 Downing Street worrying about what Oxford and
Cambridge undergraduates would do if he bombed Egypt.
October 31 was a day of surprise announcements, at least
three of them fateful. The first and most fateful one was that of
Imre Nagy, who told a cheering audience that Hungary had
demanded its release from the Warsaw Pact. Hardly anything
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 145
that Nagy could have done was more certain to make the Rus-
sians decide on full-scale repression of the revolution. This we
heard about in the streets, as our student friends took us for a
tour of the city, and they were wildly enthusiastic about it. It
was, in their view, the first real step toward a free and indepen-
dent Hungary, perhaps as a neutral country, like Switzerland,
with a role to play as a bridge between East and West.
This was, of course, to deny the reality of Hungary’s geogra-
phy. If the Poles had tried to leave the Warsaw Pact, there were
half a million Russian soldiers in East Germany to keep them
separated from the West—Poland could be attacked from East
and West simultaneously, squeezed like the filling in a sandwich.
But an independent Hungary would roll the Iron Curtain all the
way back to the border of the Ukraine, and for the first time directly
expose Soviet soil to the possibility of an attack by the West. Seen
from the point of view of anybody standing in front of a map in
the Kremlin, this must have seemed like a direct threat.
We did not hear until later that day the next piece of fateful
news—that the British and the French had bombed Egyptian
airfields and destroyed most of the Egyptian air force on the
ground. In the Middle East, the other shoe had dropped at last,
with a bang.
Only toward the end of the day did we learn the most sinister
news of all—that Mikoyan and Suslov had left Budapest and
flown back to Moscow for “consultations” with the Politburo.
Martha—who clearly knew her stuff—had told me the night
before that this was “the event to watch out for,” and here it was,
arriving on schedule, or even a little before. We did not, of
course, know that on November 2, in Moscow, the Central
Committee would make the final decision to replace Nagy with
Kádár, and to suppress the Hungarian Revolution by force.3
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148 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
. . .
None of these portents concerned our new student friends—or
perhaps the students merely wished to appear upbeat and confi-
dent to the representatives of British studenthood in their midst.
They mostly spoke decent English, while we knew no Hungar-
ian at all, so we knew only what they told us or translated for us.
We were taken on foot to see where the most significant battles
had taken place; we went to look at what remained of the statue
of Stalin—two giant bronze boots standing on top of a scarred,
defaced pink marble base. We went to Parliament and trooped
through the building, which had the improvised, revolutionary
atmosphere of the Smolny Institute in Petrograd in 1917, and
briefly saw from a distance Imre Nagy, who was returning from
making his fateful speech, his face aglow with the applause that
had greeted it—a short, plump man, with the graceful walk that
so many fat men have. He was wearing a neat bourgeois suit and
highly polished shoes, and his eyes bulged slightly behind his
pince-nez.* We went to the university, to the statues of Petőfi
and Bem, and were shown the radio station and the former
headquarters of the AVH, both of them heavily scarred by shells
and bullets and surrounded by many bouquets of flowers on the
pavement where insurgents had fallen. We were introduced to
armed student groups at various barricades around town; and
we came to realize that there was not just one armed insurgency
of Freedom Fighters, but three distinctly different ones—the
students and “intellectuals,” the much more heavily armed fac-
tory workers, and a large part of the Hungarian army itself.
* I later learned that my father had called his friend Zoltán Kodály, the com-poser, and asked him to reach Nagy and have him look after us. I am still sorry that we were added to the poor man’s burdens.
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150 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
Feelings between the three groups were not always comradely,
and the factory workers were distinctly more rough-and-ready
and threatening, often led by very exotic figures indeed, and
more motivated than the army or the students by a brutal spirit
of revenge.
Their aims were not exactly the same, either. The students
were idealistic—they wanted Hungary to achieve socialism
“with a human face,” a kind of Sweden-on-the-Danube. The
factory workers were practical—they wanted decent working
conditions and pay, and an end to unrealistic Stakhanovite
“norms” and to the party’s control over daily life. The army above
all wanted to get rid of the Russians once and for all—one of
the things that pleased the army most was Nagy’s decision
(never put into effect) to change its Soviet-style uniforms for
the “traditional” Hungarian ones.
This is not to say that many of these aims did not overlap, of
course. Still, hardly anybody, least of all Imre Nagy, envisaged a
full-scale return to capitalism and private ownership of land.
Ten years of communism had changed people’s mind-set. Some
wanted Marxism without the errors of Leninism and Stalinism;
some wanted a more humane form of communism without
Russian domination and police terror; hardly anybody was as
yet aware that the whole system was a sham and a failure, and
would lead nowhere. (The notion that Hungary would eventu-
ally emerge, thirty years later, with a thriving stock exchange,
the privatization of nationalized industries, a booming market
in luxury co-op apartments overlooking the Danube in Buda-
pest, and streets full of expensive shops and restaurants was not
one that would have occurred to Nagy or the insurgents, or nec-
essarily have appealed to them.)
In later years, and even at the time, much was made of the
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 151
Freedom Fighters’ anti-Semitism, but it has to be said that we
saw no sign of it. Admittedly, we did not know Hungarian, but
nobody even alluded to the fact that many of the most hated of
the Hungarian Stalinists were Jewish, and we neither saw nor
heard a single anti-Semitic slogan or remark. This is not to deny
that if you had gathered a few dozen Hungarians to do battle
against the Red Army in 1956 some of them might be anti-
Semites—anti-Semitism has deep roots everywhere in eastern
Europe. But anti-Semitism was not what motivated those who
fought the Russians and resisted the Hungarian communists.
They were not “counterrevolutionaries” or “White terrorists” or
“Horthy supporters” or “Jew-haters,” as the Russians and Kádár’s
government later accused them of being. They had simply had
enough of a government that depended on lies, police terror,
and Russian support, and that imposed on its people a system of
rigid ideology, grueling deprivation, and Orwellian denial of
common sense and historical reality. The awfulness of the Hun-
garian communist government managed to bridge the differences
between workers, students and intellectuals, and the army—no
mean achievement!
That night we dined again with Martha and Ian, who were
weary and depressed. They had met briefly with Cardinal Mind-
szenty, who was demanding full restitution of the church’s prop-
erty and the resumption of its “traditional” role in Hungarian
life, demands which Nagy, a lifelong communist, could not have
met even had he wanted to. From all over the country, reports
were pouring in of Soviet troop and tank concentrations head-
ing toward Budapest from all directions, and of sporadic and
hopeless fighting in many cities.
The next day, November 1, was quiet in Budapest, but there
was an edge of fear that was hard to ignore. Trams and buses
152 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
were running again on some streets; bakeries were open for
business, and long lines formed outside them; even the flower
sellers were back in business again. The general strike was
over—not officially; it simply petered out—and people who
could get back to work did. Occasionally, Soviet airplanes flew
low over the city, and almost everybody cheered, thinking that
they were American or British, and that they signaled the arrival
of paratroopers, or at least aid. Having been in the R.A.F. and
learned aircraft recognition, I knew better, but I did not think it
was necessary to tell anyone.
Had we but known, Nagy was busy protesting to the Soviet
ambassador about these same flights, and about the fact that the
major airports were in the hands of the Russians. Ambassador
Andropov (confirming the old definition of an ambassador as
“an honest man sent to lie abroad” for his country) explained
that the airports were being protected by Soviet armor in order
to secure the speedy withdrawal of Soviet citizens from Hun-
gary, and that the aircraft overhead were transports carrying
Soviet citizens home.
We attended the daily press briefing at the British legation,
and were impressed by the number of journalists, and by the air
of elegance of the legation itself. There was not much in the way
of news, although those who had attended the rival briefing at
the United States legation were able to inform us that the United
States Treasury had started to sell sterling on a huge scale, with
the result that the value of the pound had dropped precipitously,
and that Britain’s gold and dollar reserves were fast drying up.
This was not big news to the Hungarians, but it revealed to those
of us who knew anything about Britain’s finances that President
Eisenhower, only a few days away from the election, had decided
to drop the guillotine blade on Eden’s neck.
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 153
The legation staff did not look on us kindly. A senior official
took us to one side and angrily asked us what the bloody hell we
were doing here, and had we any idea how much trouble we
were making? Christopher replied that we had as much right to
be here as anybody else, and that it was his impression that Brit-
ain’s diplomatic service existed to help British subjects abroad,
not to rant at them.
That produced a very cold look. The best thing we could do
for everybody’s sake would be to get the hell out of the country,
the official told us stiffly, except that it was too bloody late—the
Russians had closed the borders as tight as a drum.
“I bet you didn’t tell Judy Cripps that,” Christopher said.
Slightly deflated, the official sighed, and said, “Well, I did,
actually, but she wouldn’t listen either. The apple doesn’t fall far
from the tree. . . . Listen, if worse comes to worst—and it bloody
will—you chaps come here, on the double. You’ve no business
being here, but you are British subjects.”
And it was true, after all. Everywhere we went in Budapest,
we were greeted as if we were the personal emissaries of Queen
Elizabeth II. Nobody felt that way about the journalists—it was
their job to be here—but we had come here voluntarily and at
our own expense, and people were to a surprising degree
impressed and comforted by that.
That evening, as we sat drinking, we heard another piece of
bad news, though it meant little to us at the time. János Kádár,
the tough, ambitious hard-liner who had been arrested and sav-
agely tortured during Rajk’s trial and had then joined the gov-
ernment of Imre Nagy, was rumored to have fled Budapest in a
Soviet armored car and to have taken refuge in the Soviet Union.
This news did not set off alarm bells in our heads, but it should
have. Kádár was a tough guy, an unsentimental realist, a survivor
154 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
of torture. If he had decided that the revolution had gone too
far—or that the Russians were going to crush it—then real war
was very likely in the immediate future.
We did not know that Kádár, before fleeing to the Russians,
had promised to go out into the streets and fight Russian tanks
with his bare hands if they attacked; we did not know that Nagy
had told the Soviet ambassador that Hungary was leaving the
Warsaw Pact and declaring its neutrality and had informed the
United Nations of that fact by cable; and least of all could we
have guessed that Nagy’s cable to the UN would be ignored at
UN headquarters in New York, where attention was concen-
trated on the fact that the Israelis had by now seized the Gaza
strip and the Sinai.
November 2 was another day of nervous calm, as the city
“normalized” itself, while the Nagy government desperately
tried to send out messages of distress. This became increasingly
difficult when the international telephone lines were cut, “acci-
dentally” as some in the government claimed (or hoped), but the
British journalists rightly assumed the worst—the Russians had
cut the lines again.
November 3 was a day of amazing beauty—a clear cold sky that
made one realize, perhaps for the first time, what a beautiful city
Budapest is. The flower sellers in the streets were joined by ven-
dors of roasted chestnuts, with the smell that marks every
autumn and winter day in central Europe. Bars and espresso
coffee shops were open; the pastry shops were open for the first
time; the streets were full of strolling people, very few of whom
were armed. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev remarked to the
Yugoslav ambassador that “Stalin had cooked up a porridge in
Hungary that the present Soviet leaders now had to eat.”4 The
“Long Live Free, Democratic, and Independent Hungary!” 155
ambassador rightly concluded that a massive Soviet attack was
about to take place.
I went to the Gellért Hotel, across the Danube, where my
uncle Alex had lived for a time during World War I, and where
there was a world-famous swimming pool that produced artifi-
cial waves. At the Gellért, the concierge, once he was informed of
my identity, left his desk to shake hands with me. He too had
had the honor of serving my dear uncle. Was I enjoying Buda-
pest? I would see—things were getting back to normal now. It
would be a pleasure for him to arrange a few sightseeing trips
for me and my friends—he could arrange for a car and an Eng-
lish-speaking driver, of course; I should not hesitate. There was
very much to see. He hoped my dear father was well?
I thanked him, secure in the knowledge that Alex had been
such a world-class tipper that no concierge anywhere in the
world was likely to forget him, and that my father’s way with
hotel personnel was also one of legendary generosity. My father
had stayed in the Gellért in the 1930s, when his friend Nicholas
Horthy, the son of the regent, had invited him back to Budapest
to seek his advice about rebuilding the film studio. My father
had not enjoyed Hungary under fascism, much as he liked
Nicholas Horthy and the Gellért. My uncle Alex had been
briefly imprisoned in the cellars of the Gellért during the White
counterrevolution, and had been saved from torture and execu-
tion by the prompt intervention of his wife Maria Corda—then
a famous movie star, and always a woman of great temperament
with a taste for operatic scenes—and my uncle Zoltán Korda
(known in the family as Zoli), who learned where Alex was in
the elevator at the Gellért, when they heard one White officer
say to another, “We’ve got that Jew bastard Korda in the cellar,
and tonight we’re going to torture and shoot him after dinner.”
156 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
Thus the Gellért had played a significant role in the history of
the Korda family, and it was with great curiosity that I visited it
for the first time.
That night the streets were quiet—no traffic, few people, no
shots at all: peace, it seemed, at last. We could not have known
that Pal Maleter—just promoted to general and vice-secretary
of defense—had gone to meet with the Soviet generals at their
headquarters to arrange the final details of their withdrawal, and
there he had been arrested at gunpoint by none other than Ivan
Serov, who was the head of the KGB and a close friend of
Khrushchev’s. (Maleter was shot, though his “execution” would
not be announced until 1958.)
Still less could we have known that during the night the
Egyptians would sink ships at both ends of the Suez Canal,
blocking it tightly to all commerce, and ensuring that the French
and the British, despite their cold feet—which were getting
rapidly colder as the franc and the pound fell—would feel
obliged to go in and take control of the canal.
7.
Götterdämmerung on the Danube
I woke in the early hours before dawn to the noise of thunder.
The electricity at the Astoria Hotel was spotty, and in any
case I didn’t want to wake my companions, so I used my flash-
light to make my way to the bathroom, which was like a mine-
field, strewn with Russell’s apparently bottomless toilet kit. Like
Michael Maude’s grandfather, he traveled with a vast array of
monogrammed objects—ivory-backed hairbrushes, manicure
set, sponge bag, razor and razor strop—an amazing amount for
a man who always looked slightly disheveled. On my way back
to bed, I pulled the thick curtain back to look at the storm. To
my surprise it wasn’t raining. I could see what looked like light-
ning flickering in the distance beyond the hills of Buda, except
that it was reddish rather than white. The low rumble continued
steadily, like a basso profundo drumbeat; then, all of a sudden, it
was followed by a vastly more unpleasant and sharper sound,
that of explosions, none of them very close for the moment, but
instantly recognizable to anybody who had lived in London
during the blitz. I had been sleepy, and expecting to get back to
158 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
bed, but all of a sudden I was fully awake, and ice-cold, even in
my dressing gown.
I looked at my watch. It was about five in the morning—just
the right time for an artillery barrage to “soften things up” before
an attack. That was the one thing you could rely on when it
came to armies—they always stuck to the same routine. This
meant that at first light we could expect troops and tanks in the
streets outside, and not for show.
I went over and woke up Christopher, who was a light sleeper.
Waking up Russell was like trying to wake up a hibernating
bear. Christopher opened an eye. “What the hell bloody time is
it?” he asked.
“Fivish.”
“Bloody hell. What’s up?”
“Artillery. They’re shelling the city.”
“I thought they were going home?”
“Yes, well, apparently they’re not. Best get up and dressed,
don’t you think?”
“Bugger! It’s bloody cold.”
It was the morning of November 4. If we had been listening
to the radio—and if we had understood Hungarian—we could
have heard the premier, Imre Nagy, announcing to the Hungar-
ian people that Soviet forces had begun an attack on Budapest
“to overthrow . . . the legal government.” Nagy added that “our
troops were fighting”; but if that was the case, there was as yet
no evidence of it, or perhaps the fighting was taking place across
the river or in the suburbs. We dressed hurriedly and went
downstairs to see what was happening. Strangely, the hotel was
silent—either the British journalists were heavy sleepers, or like
myself they had heard what they thought was distant thunder
and then rolled over in bed and went back to sleep. Most of
Götterdämmerung on the Danube 159
them had left their shoes outside their door—the Astoria was
still operating normally, and the valet picked your shoes up for
polishing every night. I noticed Martha Dalrymple’s neat little
pumps next to her husband’s big brogans. Many people had left
the “Do Not Disturb” sign (in Hungarian, German, English,
and Russian) hanging from the doorknob, but the Russian gun-
ners had felt no compunction about disturbing people.
Outside in the streets, people were beginning to appear in
small groups, heavily armed and grim-faced. Whatever illusions
had sustained the Hungarians until now—that the Americans
or the United Nations would come to their rescue; that Nagy
could make a deal with the Russians for independence or even
neutrality for Hungary; that the Russians, having been beaten
once in the streets of Budapest, would not come back for another
try—they now faced reality. The United States was within a few
hours of a presidential election, and President Eisenhower was
deeply concerned that the Soviet Union might overreact to
events in the Middle East and Hungary and start a preemptive
nuclear war; the United Nations, unwilling to offend the Soviet
Union, was more concerned with two white, colonialist powers
(and Israel) ganging up on an Arab country. Nagy had either
overplayed his hand or lost his nerve, or both; and the Russians,
smarting from their defeat, were coming back to take their ven-
geance for it.
Kossuth Lajos Utca was exactly the kind of wide boulevard
that Napoléon III had in mind, when he redesigned Paris, for
the use of artillery to cut down the mob. Since it led to the Par-
liament building, like almost all of Budapest’s grands boulevards,
there was little doubt that the Russians would be coming down
it fairly soon. Several groups of insurgents were working on this
assumption as we came out of the hotel, building improvised
160 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
barricades. We talked with a group of students and intellectu-
als—the armed factory workers were less friendly toward for-
eigners, and seldom included anyone who spoke English. This
group contained a pretty blond girl with a fur hat and a Russian
submachine gun, and was led, of all things, by a university pro-
fessor named Attila who taught English literature. The blond
young woman appeared to be his girlfriend.
“Tear up the cobblestones,” Attila advised us.
“Tear up the cobblestones?” I looked down at them. They were
not small ones, like the ones you see in France and Belgium, but
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Götterdämmerung on the Danube 161
big hexagonal blocks of stone, neatly fitted together and appar-
ently cemented into place. “What difference would that make to
a tank?”
Attila sighed, and explained. The Russian tanks had metal
treads, which were ideal for fighting in the mud or traveling on
dirt roads, but which tended to slip and slide on paved streets.
Cobblestones were wet and greasy to begin with, and if you
piled up enough of them, they were difficult for a tank to climb
over—it was likely to lose traction. At worst, pulling up the cob-
blestones would at least slow a tank down, so somebody might
be able to run up behind it and throw a Molotov cocktail onto
the engine vents, or get a shot at the side of the tank, where the
armor was thinner, with an antitank gun.
I was impressed. The general view in the Royal Air Force
was that tanks were somebody else’s business, not ours, but
Attila had received his military training in a country which had
been fought over by tanks in 1944 and 1945, and in which the
notion of young people fighting as militia was not as far-fetched
as it might seem to us. For all that he looked like the scholarly
type, Attila, like most Hungarians, had received years of sound,
practical military training, from people who took these things
seriously.
All the same, as I scuffed at the cobblestones with my shoes,
I was doubtful. “How on earth will you pick them up?” I asked.
Attila looked impatient. “With our fingernails,” he said tes-
tily. “Once you get the first one loose, the rest are easy.”
But before he could put this to the test, a truck pulled up,
piled high with spades, picks, and crowbars, on top of which sat
half a dozen rough-looking factory workers, armed to the teeth.
“Take as much as you need,” said the man sitting beside the
driver, apparently the group’s leader. “We liberated the whole
lot from the road workers’ stores.” He swung out of the cab to
162 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
unlatch the tailgate. He wore a dashing gray felt hat, of the Bor-
salino type, and a Feldgrau uniform very much like that of a
German NCO, with the badges removed—probably the uniform
of the old Hungarian army, under Horthy. On one leg he wore a
high black boot. From the knee down, the other was a roughly
carved wooden leg, which came to an end with a thick pad, like
a piece of furniture. Crisscrossed across his chest were bandoliers
of ammunition, like those of a Mexican bandit of the Pancho
Villa era; he carried a military rifle, and strapped to his leather
belt were a holstered pistol and four German “potato masher”
stick grenades. He spoke some German—Miklósdeutsch.
“Where are the Russians now?” Attila asked him.
“Every-fucking-where.”
The rumble of artillery continued, as background noise.
From time to time, a shell landed with a deafening crack within
a few blocks of where we stood, sending up a geyser of smoke,
dust, and debris. We made it our business not to duck—that was
clearly the order of the day, here in the streets. Anyway, if the
girl with the tommy gun wasn’t going to duck, neither were we.
“Have they reached the bridges yet?” The bridges on the
Danube were perhaps half a mile away, maybe less. You couldn’t
see them from here, but they were world-famous for their
beauty, according to Russell’s Baedecker.
The man in the hat shrugged. “Soon.” He reached into his
leather knapsack and produced a package wrapped in a napkin
and a large clasp knife. He unwrapped the package and, without
dropping anything, he deftly cut a few slices of salami, onion,
and black bread with one hand, and handed them around. That
was a trick I knew. My father and my uncle Zoli could do that,
and often did—it must have been something that recruits were
taught in the old Hungarian army.
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164 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
It was good, and brought back childhood memories. We all
had a swig of barack to wash it down. “We liberated lots of that
too,” the one-legged man said, with a grin. The girl took a swig
along with the rest of us. She was some girl. From the direction
of the river we could hear the fight intensifying—rising above
the noise of the artillery was the sharper, earsplitting crack of
tank guns firing, and short bursts of machine-gun fire.
“The guys holding the bridges are getting fucked in the ass
right now,” our friend with the wooden leg said. The girl did not
smile, but neither did she seem offended.
“Will they be able to hold them?” Attila asked.
“Not for long, poor sods. Anyway, the city is surrounded. The
Russkis will come from every direction, not just across the
bridges.”
“Still, it would mean something, to hold the bridges. Once
the Russians have them, they’ll attack the Parliament building,
and seize Nagy.”
“Yes, probably.” He put his finger against his head, made a
pretend pistol of it, and pulled the trigger. “And then, bang, he’s
a goner. You know, I thought he was just another communist
stooge, with soft hands. Always talking about ‘the workers.’
What the fuck does he know about work? But now, I have a
certain respect for the guy. He has balls.” He gestured toward
the blond girl. “Wouldn’t you say he had balls, honey?” She
nodded. “You see? Blondie thinks so too. Nagy discovered them
a little too late, maybe, but better late than never.” He lit a thick
black cigar that looked like a piece of rope; then, turning toward
us, he said, “Speaking of balls, where are our friends from
America?”
“We’re English,” I said.
He bowed deeply, doffing his hat in a sweeping gesture. “For-
Götterdämmerung on the Danube 165
give me, my lord. And where is the army of our distinguished
British friends?”
“On the way to Egypt, it seems,” I said.
“Of course. Look after the empire, that’s what comes first,
for you guys and the fucking French. And then there’s our
friends the Israelis! One would like to have seen that—Jews in
tanks! What next? Well, I can’t stay here gossiping all day long,
so good-bye and good luck. You be specially careful, Blondie,
eh?” We tried to ignore this reference to the Russian soldiers’
habit of raping women, and waved good-bye as he stumped
back to the truck, and it clattered off down the street. Judging
from the girl’s expression, the danger of rape was something she
had already considered.
Attila passed out the tools. The students dug up the cobble-
stones quickly enough. A few iron railings and a couple of big
trucks were added to it. Attila was anxious to add the ornamen-
tal streetlights and the poles that hold up the tramlines to it, but
these proved difficult to bring down. I suggested Primacord, an
explosive in the form of a rope that can be wound around an
object and then detonated from a safe distance, having attended
a course in which we were instructed in the use of such things by
a sergeant major of the Royal Engineers, but the students didn’t
have any. Eventually a boy on a bicycle was sent off, and brought
back some Czech “Semtek” plastic explosives and a package of
detonators from a Hungarian army unit. Watching Attila and
his intellectuals handle explosives was enough to drive us back to
a safe distance, in the doorway of the hotel. However, they even-
tually managed to bring down a fair number of streetlights and
drag them over to the barricade without having killed them-
selves. By mid-morning, it had acquired a certain bulk, although
whether or not it would stop a Russian tank remained to be seen.
166 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
The blond girl—her name was Kati, we discovered—and a
round-faced boy who didn’t seem to be more than twelve had
spent the morning collecting empty bottles. What they needed,
she said—her English wasn’t bad—was gas. Did we have any?
Christopher nodded, walked over to the VW, and came back
with one of our jerricans.
“I say,” Roger said, “we may need that, you know.”
Christopher shrugged. “We’re not going anywhere for the
moment.” The truth was that if she hadn’t been such a pretty girl,
he would probably have been the first to argue against giving up
any of our precious gas. The drill was that you dipped a strip of rag
in the gas, then balled it up tightly and stuffed it into the neck of
the bottle, with one end hanging down. The trick with a Molotov
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Götterdämmerung on the Danube 167
cocktail, Kati explained, was that you had to guess the right
moment to throw it. If you lit the rag and threw the bottle too
slowly, the whole thing went off in your face, burning you badly. We
listened with expressions of rapt interest on our faces, and no
temptation to pick up a Molotov cocktail at the first sight of a
tank.
From the direction of the bridges the sound of fighting was
still intense, but the artillery shells were landing closer to us
now. The Russians were in no hurry. This time, when they
received sniper fire, the infantry simply backed off, waited for
the tanks to get there, and blew up the whole building—or, if in
doubt, the whole block.
It was hard to ignore the shelling, though most of the shells
were landing a good distance from us. Even so, there’s an instant,
just before a shell lands, when it seems to suck all the air up in its
wake. This is an illusion, of course; shelling happens far too
quickly for that. But there’s a split second of intense quiet,
together with the feeling of being in a vacuum, unable to take a
breath; then there’s the huge sound of the explosion, momen-
tarily deafening you, making the ground tremble beneath your
feet, shattering glass in windows all around you, followed by a
swiftly rising plume of smoke and debris that fills your eyes, your
nose, and your mouth with foul-smelling grit and the acrid
stench of high explosive. Then, finally, comes the spine-tingling
clickety-clack of bits of red-hot shrapnel, shattered stone, and
odd pieces of plumbing landing. But all this takes place in a
fraction of a second, really; it’s just that the mind slows things
down.
And it isn’t happening just once; it’s repetitive, constant,
mind-numbing. Sometimes the shells land in the street, send-
ing up lethal showers of cobblestones and tram tracks, and
168 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
then geysers of mud, steam, and water from ruptured pipe-
lines. More frequently the shells hit buildings, exploding when
they’ve penetrated the roof and plunged on through one or
two floors below it, making the whole building suddenly swell
outward like a balloon that’s been overinflated, then collapse
in on itself, finally spewing itself out into the street in the form
of smoking piles of rubble. It was quite a thing to watch, probably
the unacknowledged spectator sport of the twentieth century.
Of course it gave one pause to realize that some twenty-year-
old Russian gunner was pulling the lanyard a couple of miles
away without much concern for where the shell would land—
there’s nothing “personal” about random shelling—but that’s
the kind of thought one wanted to avoid.
Attila declared a lunch break at noon. I sat down on the bar-
ricade with him, and he pulled the usual Hungarian lunch out
of his haversack: black bread, a slab of bacon coated with paprika,
an onion, a bottle of barack. We shared it companionably as the
shells whistled and exploded in buildings all around the city. I
recalled reading that shell splinters were the major cause of
death on the western front in the war of 1914–1918, and now I
could see why—occasionally they came flashing past at super-
sonic speed, glowing bright red, from small slivers that could
take your eye out or slice off your ear to great chunks that would
cut you in two. Attila ignored them. “I am reading much Eng-
lish literature for pleasure,” he said between mouthfuls, his
expression serious.
I nodded encouragingly, smiling like an idiot.
“I am reading Mr. Graham Greene.”
I said that I too was a fan of Graham Greene, and a friend.
“So? That is interesting. Would you call him a progressive
writer?”
Götterdämmerung on the Danube 169
This would have been hard to answer even without the noise
of close and distant gunfire. I explained that Graham was cer-
tainly progressive in some ways, but not in others. He was in
favor of left-wing governments in foreign countries, particularly
those we would now call “third world”; but at the same time, in
England he was a traditionalist, and part of what we called the
“establishment”—a rebellious and bloody-minded member of
it, to be sure, but a member all the same. I tried to explain what
the establishment was, conscious that I was not making much
headway.
Attila considered all this thoughtfully. “So,” he said. “This is
like our ‘nomenklatura’ under the communists, yes? But tell me,
where do you put a fascist, like Mr. Evelyn Waugh?”
I was momentarily stumped by Attila’s pronunciation of
“Waugh,” which came out as “Vaough,” but once I understood
who he was talking about, I explained patiently that Waugh was
not a fascist at all—he and Greene were Catholic converts, close
friends, and fellow members of the upper middle class, but
Waugh was a reactionary. Since both of them had a taste for
schoolboy practical jokes, it was possible that Waugh’s reaction-
ary views and Greene’s leftist views were merely different forms
of a put-on, intended to infuriate and mislead people they dis-
liked. To both of them, class, beauty, and intelligence mattered
more than politics.
This was too much for Attila to absorb, coming, as he did,
from a place where there was a political or ideological explana-
tion for everything.
“You have to understand,” I said, “that in England nobody
takes politics seriously. In England, politics are a hobby, like col-
lecting model railway trains—or collecting miniature liquor
bottles, which Graham Greene does.”
170 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
This was a novel, and unacceptable, idea to Attila. He had
turned against communism, but he had been educated as a com-
munist. “But Brighton Rock is a political novel—a proletarian
novel,” he protested.
“No, no, it’s about Catholicism, not about politics. . . . Take
Pinky . . . ” I stopped in mid-sentence, having noticed that the
firing had lessened in front of us in the direction of the Danube,
and increased behind us, to the east, where the Russians were
presumably making quicker progress. Either way, it seemed pos-
sible that the barricade would be attacked from one or both
sides very shortly—not a cheerful prospect. I pointed this out to
Attila, who waved it away impatiently. “Whichever side they
come from, we will fight them, I think,” he said.
At just that moment, Ian and Martha appeared, dressed as if
for lunch at Claridge’s. They were on the way to the American
legation, where there was to be some kind of press conference,
and asked if I would like to join them. Why not? I thought.
There did not seem to be much to be gained from conducting a
PEN seminar on the contemporary English novel with Attila
until the Russians arrived to kill us.
I made my apologies and got into their car, and we took off
through streets that unarmed civilians and armed fighters were
busily barricading. At each barricade we were stopped and asked
for our papers, as well as for an explanation of why our army was
going to Egypt, instead of coming here.
“Chap I know,” Ian said, “told me this whole show was all
Eden’s bright idea. Encourage the Hungarians to rise up and
pin down the Red Army here in the streets of Budapest while
we go for the canal.”
“Surely not?” Eden seemed to me old, sick, tired, and bewil-
dered by the postwar world, a man who had waited too long for
Götterdämmerung on the Danube 171
Churchill to retire and had succeeded to power years too late,
rather than a Machiavellian manipulator of whole countries. I
had met him once at one of my uncle Alex’s parties. I don’t know
what he was doing there; he had a certain distrust of Churchill’s
“monied” friends, people like Max Beaverbrook, or Brendan
Bracken, or Alex, who had kept the Churchill bandwagon roll-
ing through good times and bad; perhaps Eden’s young wife,
Clarissa, enjoyed a touch of film glamour. In any case, though
still handsome, Eden had looked drained, and older than I had
expected. He was like a lot of Churchill’s political collaborators:
such dynamism as he had once possessed came from Churchill,
who had a remarkable ability to fill those around him with his
own energy and optimism. On his own, no longer heir apparent
but prime minister, Eden had looked to me seedy and slightly
deflated, but then we did not know that he was already ill.
Ian was an admirer of Eden’s—it was his suits, perhaps,
which Ian’s rather resembled. “Oh, it’s quite possible, you know,”
he said. “The Russians believe it’s true, and they’re steaming
mad about it. The Yanks too. They think Eden tried to snooker
them.”
“He won’t succeed,” Martha said.
“No, no, I agree. If we’d seized the canal right away, it might
have worked, but it’s all moving much too slowly. . . . If Win-
ston were still P.M. the paratroopers would have seized both
ends of the canal before the Gyppos could block it. . . . As it
is . . . I say, here we are.”
We got out and sauntered into the American legation. Most
of the Western journalists except the Dalrymples had given up
any attempt to look dressy, and the general effect was that of a
damp, unruly mob of refugees, except for Ian, Martha, and the
man from the Times. The French and Italian journalists were
dressed as if for winter sports in the Swiss Alps. The press con-
172 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
ference was brief—America was doing its best to broker a peace-
ful resolution to the problem; the president was in touch with
everybody; for the moment the borders were reported to be
firmly closed; if things got worse American citizens—but only
American citizens—would be welcome to take shelter in the
legation. This was said with a stern look in our direction.
None of this was exactly earthshaking news, and most of the
journalists left in search of something more stimulating. The
Dalrymples knew one of the American diplomats, so we stayed
behind while they chatted with him, and were therefore among
the few people who saw the big news story of the day: Cardinal
Mindszenty’s arrival at the legation.
He came in through the door, accompanied by a monsignor.
Mindszenty was a gaunt, pale-faced figure in a black soutane,
with scarlet piping, buttons, and sash. His face had a certain
aristocratic grandeur to it, with flashing gray eyes and an aristo-
cratic beak of a nose, but he looked angry and defeated. As it
turned out, he knew Martha Dalrymple, and he paused on the
big, ornamental stairway to the second floor to say hello to her.
They spoke briefly in German, and then he blessed her and
went on up the stairs, where a group of Americans waited to
receive him on the next floor.
“I say,” she said, “there’s a story! The cardinal went to the
Parliament building to put himself and the church under Nagy’s
protection, and Nagy told him he couldn’t do anything for him,
that the best thing Mindszenty could do was to take sanctuary
at the American legation. He said Nagy told him, ‘I would go
there myself, Your Eminence, if I could, but it wouldn’t do for an
old communist like me.’ ” There was no love lost between Nagy
and Mindszenty. The cardinal was hardly out of prison before
demanding the return of all church properties confiscated by
Götterdämmerung on the Danube 173
the state and the resumption of the traditional role of the Cath-
olic church in education—all things to which Nagy would have
been unalterably opposed. The notion of Mindszenty’s seeking
the protection of a man he despised was a sign of just how bad
things looked.
We spent some time at the legation while the Dalrymples
persuaded their friend to radio the Mindszenty story out to the
West for them, since the telephone lines were cut. Nobody could
have been more eager to see us go than the Americans—it was
one thing to give Cardinal Mindszenty sanctuary, but they were
petrified at the possibility of having to protect a whole crowd of
journalists and waifs and strays, many of whom were not Amer-
ican citizens.
And who could blame them? Ian asked, as we got back into
our car. Bad enough to have Mindszenty as a houseguest for the
next few years! By now it was possible to drive the short dis-
tance back to the Astoria Hotel only by stopping at every barri-
cade and seeking information about what was going on around
the next corner.
Back at the Astoria, the barricade outside the hotel was
crushed and smoldering, the street pockmarked with shell cra-
ters and torn up by tank treads, the glass in most of the windows
shattered by the concussions. There was no sign of Attila or
Kati, or their bodies. The barricade cannot have held the Rus-
sians up for more than a few minutes while they shelled it, then
sprayed it with machine-gun fire. Curiously enough, our car,
with its Union Jack still tied to the canvas roof, was right where
we had parked it, and undamaged. Down the street a couple of
Russian tanks—they operated in pairs, each one cautiously pro-
tecting the other—were parked so as to block the street off.
Each turret swung slowly back and forth, with the tank gun ele-
174 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
vated as high as it would go. At intervals one or the other would
stop and fire toward the rooftops of the surrounding buildings.
Clearly they were being directed by somebody, perhaps on the
roof of the hotel, to suppress sniper fire. Inside the hotel, there
was a lot of plaster dust and powder fumes. Each time a tank
fired, the chandeliers tinkled and danced. I made a mental note
not to stand under one of them.
The concierge was still at his post. “Your friends are in the
bar,” he said. We found them there, drinking. They had their
heavy coats on—the heating system had failed—and looked
shaken. They had been out around the city encouraging the stu-
dents by keeping a stiff upper lip. Since the Hungarians felt we
had betrayed them by our Suez adventure, all the British, includ-
ing the journalists, felt obliged to set a good example by expos-
ing themselves to danger, as my friends had been doing all
morning. When they returned they found that the Russians had
dealt with the barricade so quickly that there had been no chance
to see what had happened to Attila or Kati. Once the smoke
cleared, they were gone.
We sat glumly, drinking and smoking, as the light outside
faded. When it was dark, the lights and the heat suddenly came
back on. The concierge came through the bar to give us the lat-
est news from the radio. János Kádár had broadcast to announce
that a new government, the “Hungarian Revolutionary Worker-
Peasant” government, had been formed “to protect Hungary’s
socialist achievements” and its fraternal relationship with the
Soviet Union, and that he was premier.
There were rumors that Imre Nagy and his closest followers
had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, and that British and
French paratroopers had at long last—far too late—been
dropped in Egypt to seize both ends of the canal.
Götterdämmerung on the Danube 175
From time to time, the hotel rocked from a nearby explosion,
while outside the noise of shooting and the explosions went on
all night. There was a dull red glow over the rooftops of Buda-
pest, punctuated from time to time by a brilliant white explo-
sion. The rattle of small-arms fire was dying down.
For all practical purposes the revolution was over.
8.
A Much Fought-Over City
For the moment, it was still possible to walk around the
city—the Russians were busy mopping up pockets of resis-
tance, their secret police units were waiting outside the city, and
their soldiers were not at first inclined to stand around in the
street dealing with civilians or asking to see their identity papers
while sniper fire continued. Sensibly, they stuck together, infan-
try and tanks, methodically attacking any sign of armed resis-
tance. Meals were brought up to them by mobile field kitchens.
It was all done according to the book, with no big surprises.
The tanks went down the wide boulevards in echelon, so that
the tank on the left could protect the one on the right, and vice
versa, each turret swinging slowly back and forth. They avoided
the narrow side streets as much as they could, though they
sometimes used side streets to outflank one of the larger barri-
cades. Most of the time, when they came to a barricade, they got
as close as they could to it, stopped, and fired directly into it. If
they could demolish it with their tank guns, they took the time
to do so, then moved forward carefully in low gear and ran right
A Much Fought-Over City 177
over it, crushing it flat, while the infantry came up behind the
tanks to polish off any survivors with grenades and submachine-
gun fire; if it was too big for the tanks to climb over—some of
the barricades relied on tramcars that had been derailed and
pushed into place by trucks—they shot it up as much as they
could, then provided covering machine-gun fire for the infantry
to move forward and deal with anybody who was still alive.
Where possible, the infantry fought their way into the buildings
on either side of the street barricades, so that they could fire
down on the fighters manning the barricades from the windows
above and catch them in a murderous crossfire.
This too was standard infantry tactics, nothing fancy. First
the infantrymen kicked down the front door of a building—or
blew it in if it was solid and old-fashioned, as many in Budapest
were—and once they were inside they went methodically from
apartment to apartment, kicking in the door, tossing a grenade
into the room, then giving it a couple of quick bursts of subma-
chine-gun fire before entering. If a window was still intact, they
smashed it to give themselves a clear field of fire, but in most
places anywhere close to the fighting the glass had already been
shattered by the shock waves from cannon fire.
This was the kind of thing the Soviet Army was good at—
there were even still quite a few older Russian officers and senior
NCOs around who had done it before in Budapest, when they
had besieged the city, then fought their way through it from
building to building near the end of World War II. Many of the
big apartment buildings and public buildings still bore the scars
of the fighting in 1945, and older people whose apartments
overlooked a barricade had mostly had the sense to move out
before the Russian infantry arrived. This perhaps explains why
the civilian death count was comparatively low, given the picture
178 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
of destruction the city presented. One thing people had learned
from 1945—and apparently passed on to the younger genera-
tion—was that you didn’t want to sit in your apartment guard-
ing your most treasured possessions if the Soviet infantry was at
all likely to break down the door and throw a grenade in.
Most of the Soviet tanks were still armed with armor-pierc-
ing ammunition designed to penetrate a tank’s armor before
exploding—there had been no time for crews to unload the
ammunition in the turret and replace it with high-explosive
rounds. That led to a curious difference between the damage
inflicted during the first round of fighting and the second. In
the first round, high-explosive tank shells brought down the
walls of even the most solid buildings, without necessarily inflict-
ing serious damage on the interior, which was often exposed
like that of an old-fashioned dollhouse. In the second round, the
armor-piercing tank shells penetrated the exterior walls without
exploding, kept going through several interior walls, and then
eventually exploded in unpredictable places deep inside a build-
ing—just where the residents were, unluckily for them, apt to be
hiding as far away from the street as possible.
We heard plenty of stories about being on the receiving end
of the shelling. A shell would plow through the thick outer wall,
leaving a neat hole not more than six inches in diameter, keep
going through the thinner and less solid inner walls, and finally
blow up when it hit an object hard enough to trigger the fuse,
deep inside the building—a steel beam, perhaps, or a massive,
old-fashioned piece of nineteenth-century plumbing. There
were people who had been in their room when a shell passed
through, and remembered hearing only a deafening crack and a
whistle, followed by a storm of plaster dust and stone chips, and
a dull explosion deeper in the building that shook everything,
A Much Fought-Over City 179
even things like the big cast-iron bathtubs which appeared to be
unshakable. The passage of the shell through the room took the
breath out of the lungs in a terrifying rush, as if all the air had
been sucked out in a single microsecond; but when they at last
managed to draw a breath again, they realized that they were alive,
still sitting unharmed in the same chair or in bed, but covered
with dust and debris, ears ringing, dazed, and staring in amaze-
ment at two neat holes opposite each other in the walls. Of
course for the person several rooms away who was lying in bed
when the shell finally exploded, it was a different story, one with
no happy ending.
Survival in a city that is being fought over is largely a matter
of luck. One of the first things you learn is that ducking, weav-
ing, and taking shelter in doorways were of limited value once
the shelling and machine-gun fire began in earnest, though they
offered a certain amount of protection against sniper fire, of
which there was a good deal. When it came to snipers, we did
what everybody else did—we crossed our fingers and made a
rush for the next doorway. It was important not to hang about,
once you were safely in a doorway—that gave you the illusion of
temporary safety, but multiplied the chances that the sniper
would adjust his aim and catch you in the open when you made
your run for the next doorway. The thing to do was to move fast,
and unpredictably, trying not to run in a straight line, and to
bear in mind that every time you heard a shot it had either
missed you or killed somebody else.
As we soon discovered, everybody had his or her own sur-
vival story, and despite the language barrier, everybody was eager
to share it with any stranger who would listen. People clustered
in small groups, mostly in doorways or on street corners that
offered a clear view of any trouble in the making, dusting their
180 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
clothes off with their hands, and taking a discreet inventory of
who was alive and who was not in their building, or on their
block. Most people had taken shelter in the basement of their
building. Many of the basements still bore air-raid instructions
from World War II, and these shelters were a pretty safe bet,
given the construction of most of Budapest’s apartment build-
ings—which had been built in the middle to late nineteenth
century, in the days when Franz Josef was emperor, and were
made to last, with huge blocks of granite, perfectly fitted and
carved with decorations by stonemasons who knew what they
were doing and were in no hurry to finish the job. It would have
taken more than a few hits from a 105-millimeter tank gun to
bring these buildings down and trap people in the basement.
Most of the people in the street were elderly, with an air of
faded gentility: men in worn but respectable dark suits, stiff col-
lars, and jaunty hats; women in overcoats that had doubtless once
been fashionable, with a scarf over their head and worn but decent
shoes or boots. They looked like middle-class people of any
European country—there was nothing proletarian about them at
all. In this respect, too, the Hungarian communist party had failed
dismally—despite fierce rhetoric on the subject, dire threats,
arrests, the confiscation by the state of small businesses, and the
attempted elimination of independent professionals, Hungary
still did not resemble the Soviet Union. The old women wearing
a flowered hat and a threadbare but nicely fitted overcoat, and car-
rying a handbag or a string shopping bag as they emerged for a
breath of fresh air on Kossuth Lajos Utca near the Astoria Hotel,
were unmistakably of the haute bourgeoisie, however impover-
ished—and however much the communist party might claim that
all forms of social and class distinction had been eliminated.
An elderly gentleman walked over to us, loden-coated, with an
A Much Fought-Over City 181
upright posture, a spry little white mustache, and a well-brushed
hat—a figure who seemed to belong more to late-nineteenth-
century Vienna than to a communist country in the middle of
the twentieth century. “You are English?” he asked.
I said we were, all too obviously. He spoke English well, with
a strong Hungarian accent, but having grown up around my
father, his brothers, and their friends, I was used to that. He had
visited England many times, before the war, he said. He knew
London well. A very nice city. He had always stayed at the Hyde
Park Hotel, where the maître d’hôtel was Hungarian. I seemed
to remember my uncle Zoltán mentioning the same thing.
“Zis is terrible, is it not?” he asked, waving a gloved hand
toward the broad avenue. To the right of us, in the direction of
the Danube, the remains of the barricade outside our hotel were
still smoldering. Farther on, Soviet tanks were lined up on the
pavement, two long rows stretching for block after block. The
tank crews had regained a measure of confidence now—most of
the tanks had their hatches open, since no one likes to be cooped
up with the hatches closed any longer than is absolutely necessary.
In many of the tanks, the commander was exposed from the
chest up, elbows on the steel rim of his hatch on top of the turret,
scanning the rooflines with binoculars, while the gun loader in
the open hatchway beside him followed the direction his com-
mander was looking in with the muzzle of the big .50-caliber
machine gun mounted on top of the turret, both hands gripping
the big wooden handles, and both thumbs on the trigger bar.
The Russian tank crews wore strange-looking padded leather
helmets with earflaps, rather like an old-fashioned football hel-
met from the Knute Rockne era. A few of the tank crews were
standing in the street beside their tanks, smoking, sheltered
from sniper fire by the solid bulk of the machine.
182 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
In the other direction there was a mass of demolished barri-
cades, and the blackened hulks of Soviet and Hungarian tanks
and self-propelled artillery hit during the first days of fighting,
when it had seemed that the Hungarians were winning and that
the Russians might leave. Most of the bodies had been cleared
away, but there were still a couple of pitiful ones farther down
the avenue, outside a grocery shop or bakery, people who had
been hit and killed while they were standing in line for bread or
bacon. At intervals, from that direction, a firefight broke out
from time to time, causing the tank drivers to gun their engines
noisily, and the tank turrets to swing around toward the sound,
like large animals alarmed by a noise.
Neither the Russian officers standing around a Soviet jeep
nor the Hungarian civilians around us seemed much concerned
by the sound of fighting a couple of blocks away. It had been the
same way with the people queuing up for food—nobody wanted
to lose a place in the line by taking shelter; and if somebody was
hit, he or she was simply dragged out of the line to the nearest
available cover, if alive, or, if dead, left at the edge of the pavement
to be picked up later by whoever was gathering bodies. I had come
to understand that this wasn’t from selfishness, or callous indif-
ference—if your family needed food (and whose did not?), your
duty was to stay in line, however frightened you might be. And,
eventually, for the civilians as for the fighters themselves, the
sheer closeness of the fighting—the fact that it was taking place
right next to you, perhaps 100 feet or less from your front door
or from the neighborhood bakery, and threatening to engulf you
at any moment—led to a kind of numb, stoic courage. Ignoring
the noise of battle and the various lethal chunks of stone and
metal that were flying through the air became something of a
badge of honor, as much for the old women with flowered hats
A Much Fought-Over City 183
as for the Soviet officers and noncoms standing around their
command jeep in the middle of the avenue, calmly chatting and
smoking their cigarettes in full view of snipers, ignoring the
amount of unpleasant stuff that came flying through the air, or
the occasional ground-shaking thud of an artillery shell landing
nearby. It was rather like the way New Yorkers carefully pay no
attention to a wailing ambulance or fire engine as it hurtles by
them, except that what people were ignoring here could kill you.
The elderly Hungarian had the same exquisite manners and
dazzlingly white teeth as so many of my father’s Hungarian
friends. It had always seemed to me that Hungarian men came
in two distinct types: the ones with perfect manners who kissed
hands and the ones who were rude, gruff, and disheveled and
never kissed hands. My father was of the second type, as was my
uncle Zoli, but many of their friends were not. Both types were
capable of great charm, but behind the charm was always a trace
of unconcealed self-interest and a ruthless determination to win
even the smallest of contests or bargains, typical of a people
whose public life had been dominated for centuries by Turks or
Austrians, and who saw themselves as a tiny minority obliged to
scheme for survival against the hostile and vastly larger popula-
tions of Slavs that surrounded them.
I offered my newfound friend a cigarette. He took it and
held it carefully for a moment, as if it were a rare object of great
value, then drew from his pocket a short, carved amber cigarette
holder; put the cigarette in it; and inclined his head as I lit both
our cigarettes. “Ah,” he said, exhaling smoke. “A Players. You
have no idea how long since I smoked one. . . . I used to bring
them back from London in the old days, when I went there on
business trips.” He made a gesture with his hands as if holding
something round. “In sealed tins, you know?”
184 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
I knew. My father also bought sealed tins containing 100
cigarettes. I asked if he had gone to London often.
He shrugged. “Before 1939, certainly, many, many times. I
was in the leather business—luxury leather, for purses, hand-
bags, jewelry boxes, bookbinding, and so on. Morocco leather,
the finest calfskin, that sort of thing. . . . Then the war came, and
we had to make leather goods for the German army. An army
uses a lot of leather, you know; still, it’s not the same. . . . Then,
after the communists took over, we were, how you say, ‘national-
ized’? Anyway, our company was taken away and turned into a
state enterprise. On the other hand, I cannot complain. Many of
our competitors were Jewish, and what happened to them in
1944 and 1945 was much worse.”
“Was the fighting in 1945 worse than this?”
“Allow me, please, to say: much, much worse. Well, the Ger-
mans were ordered to hold out here to the last man, you know.
The city was declared a ‘fortress’—Festung Budapest. The Führer
forbade any surrender, so you can imagine. . . . The siege lasted
one hundred days. How we longed for the end of the war, and
cursed the Allies for being so slow. . . . In the end, we didn’t care
that the Russians were going to take the city instead of the
Americans and the British, we just wanted it to be over. . . . Of
course who could have predicted that it would turn out like this?”
“Who indeed?”
“Well, it is nothing new. . . . Budapest is a much fought-over
city. Just in this century, there was Béla Kun in 1918, then the
Romanians, then Horthy, then 1945, and now this. . . . As soon
as one gets the city tidied up there’s another war or revolution.
Not like London.”
“London had the blitz.”
“So. But not with the tanks in the streets, or firing squads, or
A Much Fought-Over City 185
bodies hanging from trees. Or mass rape. Being bombed is bad,
of course, but being invaded by foreigners is much worse, believe
me, my dear sir.” He took the cigarette out of the holder, and
carefully pinched it until it was extinguished, then slipped the
stub in his pocket. “I didn’t catch your name,” he said.
When I told him he raised an eyebrow. I was never quite sure
how people would react to my name in Hungary. Some peo-
ple—perhaps most—simply admired the Kordas because they
had become rich and famous abroad, which for many remained
the Hungarian dream. Older people remembered the films my
uncle Alex had made in Hungary, and his marriage to my aunt
Maria, then a great star until talkies brought her career to an
end; but I couldn’t depend on a friendly reaction. To Horthyites
of the old school a Hungarian Jew, however famous, was hardly
Hungarian at all; and the fact that in 1919 Alex had accepted an
appointment to Béla Kun’s “Directory for the Film Arts,” which
reported to the Council of Commissars, was neither forgiven
nor forgotten—for Kun was an ardent believer in the value of
the film as communist political propaganda, and lavished on the
Hungarian film industry a degree of personal attention and
interest which might better have been directed toward arming
the proletariat or fighting the Romanians.
Alex had always said that he had had no choice, if he wanted
to continue making films, and I suspect that this was true. For
the same reason, my father joined the communist-led Trade
Union of Artists and Designers in 1919, during the Béla Kun
period, and as a result was expelled from the Academy of Fine
Arts when Horthy seized power; he left shortly afterward for
Vienna. There was a price to be paid in twentieth-century Hun-
gary for making a political mistake, even in the arts—
one of Alex’s friends, the film director Sándor Pallós (who also
186 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
happened to be Jewish), was tortured and executed by Horthy’s
followers for having made a movie of Gorky’s Chelkash, which,
unfortunately for Pallós, Béla Kun admired. It is hardly surpris-
ing that so many Hungarian film people fled to Hollywood,
where the worst that could happen to you was being fired by
Louis B. Mayer or Harry Cohn, not being tortured and shot.
On the other hand, convinced communists objected to Alex’s
famously expensive lifestyle, his friendship with reactionary fig-
ures like Churchill, and the many films he had made glorifying
the British empire. To them Alex had sold out and had put him-
self, objectively, on “the wrong side of history”—the “right” side
being presumably represented by the idling tanks on Kossuth
Lajos Utca.
Whatever the elderly gentleman with the cigarette holder
thought, he was at any rate too polite to say it. He shook his
head in wonderment. “Of all things,” he said. “What a time to
come looking for your—” He paused for the word. “Roots?”
“I’m not really looking for them.”
“No? But it might be an interesting thing to do. You’d have
to start in—where?”
“Pusztatúrpásztó, where they were born. Or Turkeve, where
they went to school.”
“A good, solid rural background. In Hungary, this is consid-
ered an excellent thing. All Hungarian politicians claim to have
grown up on a farm, with bare feet and dirt under the finger-
nails. But your father’s family were Jewish, were they not?”
I nodded.
“Then you wouldn’t find too many of your relatives there
alive today, I’m afraid. The Germans went through that part of
the country late in 1944, rounding the Jews up. The SS were
very thorough, and the Arrow-Cross people and the Hungarian
A Much Fought-Over City 187
gendarmerie very brutal.” He said it matter-of-factly. Here, the
murder of the Jews was just another horror of war and politics,
not a special one, or, as in some places in the West, the only one
people knew about.
“So I’ve read.”
“You’re very well informed about Hungary, for a young Eng-
lishman. And your friends and colleagues, do they also know
any Hungarian history?”
“No. Most of them don’t have a clue about anything that
happened here before the students tore down Stalin’s statue last
week.”
“This is the problem with a small country like Hungary.
Nobody cares about our history. We know more about your his-
tory than you know about ours. But we Hungarians have a
thousand years of history, after all—quite as long as yours. More
history than we really need, frankly. Most of it is tragic,
unfortunately.”
He looked up and down the avenue. Not much seemed to be
going on. In a nearby telephone booth there was a pile of arms—
Freedom Fighters who were abandoning the fight or were
wounded often left their weapons in a telephone booth, for
somebody else to pick up and use. By now, however, all those
with a grain of sense were getting rid of whatever weapons they
had. Once the Russian secret police and military police arrived,
and with them the members of the AVH who had survived,
possession of a weapon would almost certainly lead to a death
sentence, or perhaps even summary execution. This was not,
after all, a war—it had been a revolution superimposed on a civil
war, and in revolutions and civil wars people don’t carry a copy
of the Geneva Convention about with them in their pocket.
There were no rules on either side about surrendering. AVH
188 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
personnel and informers who had come out into the street with
their hands up had been shot at point-blank range by infuriated
armed civilians; and the Russians viewed the Freedom Fighters
as reactionary franc-tireurs whom they were perfectly entitled
to execute—a view that would have been shared by most armies.
Even under the Geneva Convention an armed civilian is not
entitled to the same treatment as a uniformed soldier. This was
something that every student or worker who took up arms had
to face, not to speak of Hungarian army personnel, who would
be treated as traitors for turning their arms on the Russians and
the Hungarian secret police.
Of course the time to start thinking about this sort of thing
is not when the other side has just won; but all over Budapest—
indeed all over Hungary—people were grimly facing the price
they would have to pay for having taken part in the revolution.
Soon, there would be arrests, investigations, forced confessions,
a careful scanning of the names of those who had signed peti-
tions or made broadcasts and speeches, and no doubt a pains-
taking search through the thousands of photographs that had
appeared in the Western press for faces that could be identified
and matched up to a name. There is always a terrible price to be
paid for a revolution that has failed, and the Hungarians were
about to pay it.
Across the street, my friends were chatting with a small
group of students, now unarmed, under the sharp but indiffer-
ent gaze of the Soviet tank crews—only two things interested
them at present, weapons and cameras, and neither was present.
I had long since stopped carrying a camera around, for nothing
was more certain to provoke them. Somebody in the Kremlin
must have complained to the Soviet defense ministry about the
number of photographs of the fighting appearing in the West-
A Much Fought-Over City 189
ern press, and the complaint had made its way down to the level
of the troops.
My Hungarian friend and I shook hands with central Euro-
pean formality. Since the streets looked clear, he was going to
fetch his wife and take her shopping, he said. There would prob-
ably not be much to buy, he thought, but it was important to
stick to one’s routine. I gave him the rest of my packet of Players,
which at first he refused to accept, than slipped into his pocket
gratefully. “It will remind me of happier days, before the war,” he
said. “Go careful, English.”
“And you too.”
“We are not making politics, my wife and I, so I think we
have nothing to fear. But things will be very hard here for a long
time.” He shrugged. “This we are used to in Hungary,
however.”
I walked over to the telephone booth—it bore a certain
resemblance to the ones in London—fished through my pocket
for change, and called the number that Graham’s friend the
MI6 man had made me memorize in the bar at the Ritz Hotel.
To my surprise the telephone worked. I could hear it ringing at
the other hand, despite a lot of static and buzzing. It took an age
before anyone answered, but eventually a crisp English voice
said, “British legation.”
“I was given this telephone number by a chap in London,” I
started to explain.
“Given it? It’s in the bloody Budapest telephone book.”
“I was told that this was a confidential number that I was to
memorize, not write down.”
“Nonsense. There’s nothing confidential about it all. Who is
this, anyway? We’re frightfully busy here.”
I gave our names, and was swiftly interrupted. “Not the
Oxford undergraduates, surely? You chaps had better get over
190 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
here as quickly as you can. There’s been a hell of a fuss about the
lot of you. The Hungarians have been raising hell, and so has
the Foreign Office. What on earth did you think you were doing,
wandering around Budapest in the middle of a revolution? Is
Judy Cripps with you?”
“No.”
“Damn. Nobody knows what’s become of her. I do think you
might have realized that we have more important things to do
than to wet-nurse a bunch of undergraduates over here on a lark.”
“We were delivering medicine . . . ”
“Oh, very noble of you, I’m sure. Well, don’t expect any thanks
from the Foreign Office. Or your colleges, either, I shouldn’t
wonder. I suppose you know the border’s sealed?”
“Nobody told us that.”
“Well, I’m telling you. Sealed tight as a drum. Get over here,
and smartish, please. If there’s one thing we don’t want it’s a
show trial of British subjects.”
This was very far from the kind of greeting that I had
expected, but my comrades didn’t seem particularly surprised or
concerned. We decided to walk over to the legation—the stu-
dents felt we would be safer on foot than in the car, since the
Russians tended to open fire at any moving vehicle, even the
ambulances, which they had, mistakenly, convinced themselves
were carrying ammunition and reinforcements to the fighters in
the streets.
There was something inexpressibly sad about the level of
destruction. It’s not something you notice while the fighting is
in progress—the noise, the adrenaline rush, and the smoke
obscure what is happening, and produce a kind of tunnel vision,
in which you look only at what is directly in front of you, or at
the place from which danger seems to be coming. (Of course
A Much Fought-Over City 191
that can get you killed. Staring at the place from which machine-
gun bullets appear to be coming tends to immobilize you, like a
rabbit caught on the road in a car’s headlights at night, and
makes you an easier target to hit.) In any case, you don’t waste a
lot of time studying the effect of artillery fire on nineteenth-
century buildings while the shells are still falling—it’s only
afterward that you realize the extent of the damage, and the
sheer, wanton carelessness of war.
That and the smell of war—the odors of burned rubber, of
oil and gas, of damp earth and cellars that were never meant to
be exposed, of plaster dust and brick powder from the mounds
of debris, and of cooking gas and sewage from severed mains
and half-demolished houses. The city, as we walked through it,
seemed deserted, except for clusters of Soviet troops at strategic
intersections, but of course that was an illusion. The revolution
was over; the safest place to be was indoors, waiting for “order to
be restored,” as the phrase goes.
At places where the fighting had been particularly intense—
certain of the more important intersections on the broad ave-
nues leading toward the Parliament building, the Kilián barracks
(where Pal Maleter, who was then a colonel, had led the fight),
and around the Parliament building itself—the destruction was
enormous, proof, if any had been needed, of just how fierce the
fighting had been. Masonry and rubble had poured out onto the
cobblestones from damaged buildings; tanks and self-propelled
artillery that had been hit by gunfire were scattered around in
profusion; everywhere there was broken glass and twisted tram
rails and snarls of cable like the most grotesque modern sculp-
ture, and the omnipresent sharp chemical smell of expended
high explosives. Paving and sidewalk pavement were scarred by
tank treads and explosions, and in many places the cobblestones
192 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
had been pulled up to create a barrier, as outside the hotel. There
was no telling how much of Budapest had been destroyed, but
walking through the main streets of the central part of town was
a deeply depressing experience.
It was readily apparent why the Russians had won so quickly.
They had, of course, a huge advantage in numbers, and an over-
whelming superiority in weapons; and despite later claims to the
contrary, the insurgents had no such thing as a unified insurgent
strategy or command. Indeed, the different insurgent groups
had no way of contacting each other or a rebel “headquarters,”
had one existed outside the Russians’ imagination, except the
telephone system, whereas the Russians were linked by a radio
in each vehicle, and were following a well-thought-out plan.
The Freedom Fighters threw up barricades where they pleased,
while the Russians advanced methodically from point to point,
first sealing off the city, then taking the bridges over the Danube,
and finally moving from major intersection to major intersection
along the broad avenues of the city center, eliminating points of
resistance and isolating the fighters in the streets from any con-
tact with what remained of Nagy’s government. If nothing else,
they had learned something from their failure in the first phase
of the revolution—and doubtless from wiser heads at home in
Moscow who had fought their way into Budapest against the
Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS, and Hungarian fascist forces in 1945.
The British legation was cordoned off by Russian tanks, but
this, we were told by one of our student guides, was because of a
demonstration by Hungarian women, who had gathered outside
the legation to sing patriotic songs and the Hungarian national
anthem and had been dispersed by Russian tanks. Nobody
seemed clear about why the women had picked the British lega-
tion, though it seemed to me possible that they might have been
A Much Fought-Over City 193
intending to express shame and outrage that the British had not
intervened in any way—and by attacking Egypt had freed the
Soviet Union to use force in Hungary—rather than any kind of
solidarity with the West. Whatever they were hoping to com-
municate, the Russian tank crews had been determined to pre-
vent them from doing it, and one of them had even aimed his
tank gun straight into the doorway of the British legation to
discourage anybody inside from trying to make contact with the
Hungarians outside.
The tanks had by this time been reinforced by NKVD men,
posted to prevent anybody but British subjects from entering
the legation. Our passports were laboriously examined and our
names taken before we were allowed in. Inside the door, the
British military attaché glared at us, every bit as hostile as the
Soviet security troops outside, and examined our passports sus-
piciously in the hallway. “Well, I suppose you’re British,” he said
reluctantly, handing them back to us. He looked at us from head
to foot as if we were recruits on parade. “God knows you look
British enough.” He sighed. “You’ve put us all to a good deal of
trouble,” he said.
That had certainly not been our intention, I pointed out.
Things had been pretty bad out there in the streets, in case he
hadn’t noticed.
“Things have been pretty bad in here,” he replied sharply.
“We’ve got nearly a hundred odds-and-sods camping in the
legation. Journalists, photographers, waifs and strays, even a few
mothers with infants. . . . People have been sleeping on the
floors, the canteen has run out of food, and every bathroom is in
use. We ran out of sherry days ago. The legation isn’t a hotel, you
know. We can’t feed every British subject in Budapest, and cer-
tainly not for free—the F.O. would never authorize that.”
194 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
With varying degrees of resentment and irritation we said
that we weren’t expecting to be fed—when I had called, I was
told we should get over here on the double, and here we were.
“Who told you that?”
He hadn’t given me his name, I said.
“Well, he should have. And you should bloody well have
asked.”
I could see that there was going to be an explosion from
either Christopher or Russell. Christopher had a certain amount
of regimental pride and swagger—at any moment he was likely
to ask what the military attaché’s regiment was, and point out
that his own was vastly senior and more distinguished—while
Russell, though lethargic and even-tempered most of the time,
was capable of sudden bouts of violent bad temper. Tactfully, I
suggested that we leave the hallway and go inside, and as we did,
I saw that the military attaché was at least correct about condi-
tions inside the legation—it looked like a Gypsy encampment.
It had, to begin with, the typically ambivalent foreign office
decor—the building must once have been a luxurious private
mansion, but the furniture was strictly Ministry of Works “G-
Plan” stuff, cheap plywood imitations of Scandinavian modern.
Glittering nineteenth-century chandeliers sparkled above fake
wood tabletops and plastic chairs with chrome legs; a lovely
marble stairway, designed for making a grand entrance, curved
up to a cheap-looking wooden door marked “Private”; walls that
had no doubt once borne expensive paintings were covered with
cork bulletin boards.
Beneath the chandeliers an untidy, unhappy, and unruly band
of British passport holders was encamped. There were photog-
raphers, surrounded by their equipment; journalists clutching
their portable typewriters as if a typewriter were a badge of
A Much Fought-Over City 195
office; harassed mothers trying to cope with screaming infants;
and many unidentifiable types with some claim to British citi-
zenship who had surfaced in Budapest and taken refuge from
the fighting in the legation. A few were stretched out on the
floor sleeping, but most of them were engaged in noisy recrimi-
nation with the legation staff—the journalists wanted to com-
municate with their papers in London, the photographers
wanted to get their negatives out of the country as quickly as
possible, the mothers wanted fresh milk and diapers, and the
staff wanted—more than anything else—to get rid of these
unwelcome guests. None of us was tempted to join these British
subjects in distress, whose complaints could not be satisfied—
there was no milk in Budapest; the Russians had cut the inter-
national telephone lines; nobody knew what was happening at
the border crossing points to Austria and West Germany.
“You see how it is,” the military attaché said, and we did. The
squalor of the scene was enough to kindle a certain sympathy in
our hearts for him and the long-suffering legation staff. He led
us through the crowd of our fellow Britons, ushered us into a
tiny office, and handed us over to a harassed diplomat, perhaps
the one I had talked to.
“I don’t know how or why you got into the country, or what
you’ve been doing,” he said brusquely, “but how do you propose
getting out?”
“The same way we got in,” Roger said.
“No. Out of the question. The Hungarians and the Russians
would love to get hold of you four. They’ll say you were sent
here to stir up the students.”
“That’s all rot.”
“I daresay, but they’ll get somebody to say that’s what you
were doing. Even get one or two of you to admit to it. No, no,
196 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
don’t underrate them, not when it comes to that sort of thing. . . .
You’ll have to leave in a convoy. We’re trying to put the first one
together now. Oh, and by the way, take that bloody Union Jack
off your car! The Hungarians and the Russians think it’s a sign
that you have some kind of official status. You can stay here if
you like until we’ve got permission from the Russian Kommand-
tura to send the convoy.”
It did not seem to surprise the diplomat that we chose to
return to the hotel, which, however badly damaged, would surely
be more comfortable than the legation. Perhaps pleased that he
was not about to get four more boarders, he agreed to let us know
when the convoy was forming, probably early tomorrow morn-
ing, and sent us on our way with a warning not to make trouble.
But trouble was the last thing we had in mind. We and the
remaining British journalists sat in the bar of the hotel in our
overcoats drinking warm beer by candlelight—electric power
was intermittent and spotty. There was nothing cheerful to say.
János Kádár had announced on the radio that the new govern-
ment was in control of the situation, although from here and
there in Hungary a few heartbreaking farewell transmissions
were being recorded from places where the insurgents, now
being labeled “fascist counterrevolutionaries and criminals,”
were still in control. These would cease within the next few
hours, as one by one the last voices of the revolution were
silenced.
For the first time in many days there was silence in the streets
of Budapest as well—no shots, no explosions, no sound of tank
treads. Armed resistance had ceased.
Early in the morning a messenger from the British legation
came around to tell us where the convoy was being formed, and
gave us all little printed stickers to put on our windshields.
A Much Fought-Over City 197
Everyone else had the word “journalist” printed in English,
Hungarian, and Russian. Ours had the word “students” written
out in ink.
At the appointed time we assembled in a broad avenue near
the legation, a motley collection of cars and buses—mostly
buses, or cars with Austrian plates, which the journalists had
rented in Vienna. Roger, in a burst of patriotism and a reluc-
tance, typical of the Royal Navy, to give in to orders from a mere
civil servant, had insisted on keeping the Union Jack on the roof
of the car. It caused a certain amount of consternation among
the journalists, some of whom thought it might protect us from
being strafed, while others thought it might inspire the Rus-
sians to shell us.
Our friend from the legation read us our marching orders.
We were not to leave the convoy, which would stop at appropri-
ate intervals for certain inevitable “human needs”; under no
circumstances were we to attempt to take photographs; we were
not to talk to civilians or Soviet military personnel; we were to
have our passports ready to show at all times. The convoy would
be led by a car from the British legation, and followed by a car
from the Hungarian Foreign Office—a glance behind us
revealed a shady-looking trio of heavies in shiny black leather
trench coats and the kind of hats that Jean Gabin used to wear
in French gangster films, standing beside a muddy Russian
Pobieda sedan. Christopher waved at them, but they ignored
him. “Thugs,” he said.
Taking our place in line, we drove slowly out of Budapest. If the
center of the city was depressing, the western outskirts were
worse—lines of Soviet tanks, army trucks, and armored infantry
carriers stretched for miles. Moscow had sent an army of 500,000
198 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
men to subdue a nation of 10 million people, of whom only a
few thousand, many of them university students and teenagers,
were armed and fighting. And even so, the insurgents had
soundly defeated the first Russian attack and had held the mas-
sive second one off for several days of pitched street combat. It
was not exactly a military performance calculated to make the
men in the Kremlin sleep better at night.
Few civilians were in the streets, and those we saw carefully
avoided looking in our direction. The day was gray and misty,
with occasional showers of cold rain—autumn in central Europe.
There had been little or no fighting in the dreary suburbs of
Budapest—this was hardly surprising, since most of the fighters
had been university students or factory workers—and except for
the occasional Soviet patrol on the road, there was not much in
the way of a Soviet presence as one left the city. No doubt, in
their usual methodical way, the Russians had seized the airports,
the railway stations, the telephone exchanges, and the radio sta-
tions. Once these were firmly in their hands, the rest could be
left to the secret police and the communist puppet government
of János Kádár.
As we proceeded toward the border, we could see, on either
side of the road, long lines of people walking in the same direc-
tion—men pushing bicycles loaded with their belongings,
women pushing strollers and prams, small children, older people
carrying suitcases or sacks thrown over their shoulders, an end-
less procession of misery.
It was impossible not to feel guilty at the sight of them. We,
after all, were in a car, and at the border we would be handed
over to the Austrians—they were on foot, and would have to
find a way across the border as best they could. Without pass-
ports or visas or money they would become stateless refugees
A Much Fought-Over City 199
the moment they left Hungary, and would be unable to return
for many years, if ever. They were, in effect, “voting with their
feet” against communism, determined to leave the country at
any cost or risk. No doubt some of them had fought in the revo-
lution and had a good deal to fear once “order” was restored and
the secret police resumed work; but many—by the looks of
them, the majority—had not, certainly not the women with
small children, or the old people, or the small groups of children
walking toward Austria by themselves, so far as one could judge.
Győr, when we drove through it, was a picture of desola-
tion—the fighting here had been intense, and everywhere there
were signs of it: bodies, burned-out tanks, shattered buildings
with gaping holes in the masonry, the remains of desperate last-
minute barricades. We did not stop—indeed at every intersec-
tion there was a Russian vehicle, and a group of soldiers with
sullen, angry faces waving us on toward the West.
At the border, we did not get out of our cars. A man from
the legation gathered up our passports, took them into the Hun-
garian border control post, where they were stamped, and
brought them back. Somebody had already thought to provide a
new rubber stamp with the hammer and sickle on it, to replace
the one which had been defaced and which had been used to mark
our entry into Hungary. The flag with the communist emblem
cut out of it had been replaced too, and there were a couple of
Russian tanks nearby, the crews smoking as they stared at us.
The refugees, presumably, spread out into the fields and woods
before they reached the border crossing and made their way to
Austria through open country—a risky business, since there
were minefields here and there, as well as plenty of barbed wire.
There was confirmation of this on the other side of the bor-
der, as we crossed into Austria. Once they had made their way
200 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
across the border, the refugees were directed to the Austrian
border post, where, drawn up along the highway, there were Red
Cross ambulances, army field kitchens, buses, and police vehi-
cles. The Austrians had improvised, with international help, a
kind of makeshift disaster relief organization on their border
with Hungary, though judging by the number of people milling
about they were stretched to the breaking point. Clearly, the
Russians had decided not to bother with the frontier for the
moment—they had plenty to do in the rest of the country, and
besides, there was probably something to be said for letting the
malcontents go. For a brief period the Iron Curtain would be
open here a crack; no doubt in a few days, when the Russians
and the Kádár government had time to deal with it, it would be
lowered down tightly again. In the meantime, so long as the ref-
ugees stayed away from the official border crossings, nobody
was shooting them as they fled from Hungary into Austria and
West Germany. It was perhaps the only humane decision made
by the Kremlin and the Kádár government in the aftermath of
the revolution.
As we drove slowly through the crowds of refugees lining the
road to Vienna, I saw quite suddenly, and unmistakably, Gra-
ham Greene’s friend from MI6, with whom I had had a drink
only a few days ago in London. He was dressed in the uniform
of a major of the Royal Army Medical Corps, with a Red Cross
armband on the left sleeve of his tunic.
I waved at him, but he cut me dead.
9.
“Slaves We Shall No Longer Be!”
W ith hindsight, all things are clear. It is clear enough now,
half a century later, that the resentment of the Hungar-
ian people toward their government and toward the Russian
occupiers was deliberately kept simmering by Radio Free Europe,
as a kind of reflex taunting of the Russian bear by America; that
nobody in Washington ever seriously considered what the conse-
quences might be; and that the British contributed to this situa-
tion, with a combination of cunning and ineptitude, as a prelude
to their own attack on Egypt—a cynical policy that was to lead
to failure on the Nile and the Danube, and marked the demise
of the United Kingdom as a great power. Still, the revolution
was brewing, and would surely have boiled over without any
encouragement from the West.
It is equally clear that the Russians never had any intention of
reaching a compromise solution with Nagy. The events of 1956
in Hungary were, in Soviet eyes, simply a fascist “counterrevolu-
tion”; to admit even the possibility that they represented a popu-
lar uprising was heresy. The Soviet Union stalled and played for
202 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
time and then, when everything was ready, used massive force—
500,000 men; 5,000 tanks; and a full complement of KGB
troops—to crush the revolution. Every vestige of doubt, revolt,
or disloyalty was zealously stamped out. There were hundreds of
executions and many thousands of prison sentences as the Kádár
regime took control of the country on behalf of its Soviet over-
lords. Imre Nagy, who had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy,
was betrayed by his hosts; kidnapped by the KGB; taken to
Romania, where he was tortured; and then brought back secretly
to Hungary and shot, like Pal Maleter, along with four of the
senior members of his government. Their “trials” and their death
sentences were not announced until 1958, with the cynical note
that “the death sentences had already been carried out.”
Kádár, the supreme realist—who had been arrested and tor-
tured during Rajk’s trial, had joined Nagy’s government in
October 1956, and had then defected to the Russians and presided
over Nagy’s execution—ruled until 1988, gradually introducing
“goulash communism,” in which a consumer society made up
for the lack of political freedom and choice. Hardly anybody,
even in the communist world, ever had a more cynical or longer-
lasting career than Kádár. He was the Hungarian Machiavelli, a
man with an unrivaled gift for survival. If he had any kind of
insight, his last years must have been lived in spiritual torment.
More than 100,000 Hungarians crossed the frontier into
Austria and Germany in 1956—whether because the Soviets
were happy to see them go, or because the Soviets were too busy
with other problems to pay much attention to securing the bor-
ders, is hard to say.
In the end—though of course there is no “end” in history—
Hungary has become a democracy with a prosperous capitalist
economy, and a member of the European Union and of NATO.
“Slaves We Shall No Longer Be!” 203
This outcome would have seemed unimaginable in 1956, and
perhaps was not at all what most of the insurgents really
intended. Hungary is, at last, decisively part of the West, and the
fault line between East and West has moved, once again, farther
eastward, perhaps to the border between the new Ukraine and
Russia, perhaps even farther. Volkswagens are being produced in
new, modern Hungarian factories; Prada, Vuitton, and Ralph
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204 j o u r n e y t o a r e v o l u t i o n
Lauren shops glitter on the main shopping streets of Budapest;
everybody seems to have a cellular phone; and the restaurants
include some of the best and most expensive in Europe. A happy
ending, one might say, if one believed in happy endings.
Still, the end of the Hungarian story was never in Hungary.
The Hungarians stood up to the Soviet Union, bravely and
alone; and although they lost, inevitably, they created a deep fis-
sure in the monolith of communism that would eventually—
within thirty years, not a long time in terms of history—bring
the entire edifice toppling down. It was the story of David and
Goliath all right, but with a delayed ending. From 1945 to 1956,
the Soviet Union seemed all-powerful, and indeed many people
thought its future would be to dominate the world—“We will
bury you,” Nikita Khrushchev told the Americans—but from
1956 to its inglorious collapse, communism and the Soviet
Union were haunted by what had happened in the streets of
Budapest, which no amount of space flights or nuclear weapons
could paper over. Goliath had been defeated once. Admittedly,
he recovered and came back for a second round with a ven-
geance—but he could no longer lay claim to invincibility, to the
“inevitable triumph” of socialism, let alone to humanity and
decency. Communism, to borrow the immortal words of T. S.
Eliot, died “not with a bang but a whimper,” and it was the
Hungarians who first challenged its ability to survive.
As for the rest of the story, the four of us who went there
(together with Judith Cripps) eventually returned home and
resumed our life as undergraduates.
Attila, the university professor turned street fighter, survived,
and turned up at a lecture I gave in Toronto. Another one of
those Hungarians who can assimilate themselves anywhere, he
now teaches literature in Canada.
“Slaves We Shall No Longer Be!” 205
His girlfriend Kati survived too, stayed in Hungary, married,
and sends me a card whenever one of my books is published in
Hungary.
I saw Graham Greene’s friend from MI6 walking down the
opposite side of Jermyn Street some years later, carrying a tightly
furled umbrella, and dressed in a dark suit with a bowler hat
and—improbably—an I Zingari tie. Our eyes met briefly, but
we didn’t greet each other.
For those who survived, life goes on, and even looking back
in time, for those of us who were there, the events of October and
November 1956 seem remote now, something out of another age.
But it is always that way with revolutions. Those who live
look back on them with wonder, amazed that they could ever
do, or experience, such a thing, as Wordsworth looked back on
the French Revolution and wrote:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.
Perhaps that is the best epitaph of all.
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
I am deeply indebted to many people for their help, but would like
to thank particularly Carol Bowie and Helen Chin for their help
with the manuscript and Kevin Kwan for photo research. I am
especially grateful to David McCullough, Michael Beschloss, Lord
Thomas, Sir Martin Gilbert, Sir Alistair Horne, and Andrew Rob-
erts for their thoughtful reading of the manuscript and their many
practical suggestions; and to Katalin Bentley and Ambassador Gabor
Horvath for their help in obtaining documents and research material
from Hungary. For their unfailing enthusiasm, I would also like to
thank Hugh Van Dusen and Marie Estrada of HarperCollins; and
for her absolute faith in my ability to write this book—finally, after
all these years—my agent, Lynn Nesbit.
N O T E S
c h a p t e r s a n d
I have relied for the most part on A Concise History of Hungary, by
Miklós Molnár, for historical information; and I found most of the
information on famous Hungarians in “Nobel Prize winners and
famous Hungarians,” [email protected], a veritable mine of
names, biographies, and facts about famous Hungarians.
c h a p t e r
I have relied largely on Miklós Molnár and on A. J. P. Taylor’s
The Origins of the Second World War for this chapter.
c h a p t e r
1. Winston S. Churchill: The Second World War, Vol. 6, Triumph
and Tragedy, p. 198.
2. Among the many books consulted for this account of Soviet
policy after the death of Stalin, one of the most useful is The
Soviet Tragedy, by Martin Malia.
3. Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne, and János M. Rainer: The 1956
Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents, p. 181.
4. Ibid.
c h a p t e r
For the chronology of the Hungarian Revolution I have relied,
beyond my own memory, on Békés, Byrne, Skardon, and Rainer,
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution; and often more on Reg Gadney’s
Cry Hungary! Uprising 1956, which is very usefully organized on a
day-by-day basis. Where there are differences, I have, for the most
part, accepted Gadney’s version of events.
1. For the account of events to which I was not a witness, from
October 23 to October 30, I have relied principally on Reg
Gadney’s account in Cry Hungary!
2. Békés, Byrne, and Rainer, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, p. 268.
3. Ibid.
4. Gadney, Cry Hungary! (and elsewhere).
c h a p t e r
I am indebted to David McCullough and to Andrew Roberts for
their suggestions and help with this chapter.
1. For much of the information and chronology of the next three
pages I am indebted to Reg Gadney’s invaluable Cry Hungary!
2. These are the only names in the book I have changed, except
for those of Freedom Fighters.
3. Békés, Byrne, and Rainer, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, p. 354.
4. Ibid, 336.
210 Notes
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Békés, Csaba, Malcolm Byrne, and János M. Rainer (eds.): The 1956
Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents, Central Euro-
pean University Press, Budapest, 2003.
Churchill, Winston S.: The Second World War, Vols. 1 to 6, Cassell,
London, 1948–1954.
Elliott, Geoffrey, and Harold Shukman: Secret Classrooms, St. Ermin’s,
London, 2002.
Gadney, Reg: Cry Hungary! Uprising 1956, Atheneum, New York, 1986.
Gyorkei, Jeno, and Miklos Horvath (eds.): 1956—Soviet Military
Intervention in Hungary, Central European University Press,
Budapest, 1996.
Heller, Andor: No More Comrades, Regnery, Chicago, 1957.
Horthy, Nicholas: Memoirs, Lightning Print, La Vergne, Tenn., 2000.
Malia, Martin: The Soviet Tragedy, Free Press, New York, 1994.
Márton, Endre: The Forbidden Sky, Little, Brown, Boston, 1971.
Molnár, Miklós: A Concise History of Hungary, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge, 2001.
Taylor, A. J. P.: The Origins of the Second World War, Atheneum,
New York, 1983.
Academy Award, 23Academy of Applied Arts, 21Academy of Fine Arts, 21, 185Afghanistan, 12agriculture
collectivized, 10, 69, 79–80Hungarian, 44–45, 53
airplanes, Soviet, 152America. See United StatesAndropov, Yuri, 90, 108, 152anti-Semitism. See also Jews
communism and, 50, 71Miklós Horthy’s, 18, 21, 50–55,
185–86Hungarian Freedom Fighters and,
13, 150–51Nazi, 56–57, 61–63, 186–87
armor-piercing shells, 99, 178–79Árpád, 16Arrow Cross party, 63, 186–87artillery
author’s experience of, 167–68boulevards and, 124, 159–60Hungarians and, 182–83
artists, 21–22, 24Astoria Hotel, 119, 136–43, 157–59,
166, 173–75Attila, Professor, 160–70, 174, 204Attila the Hun, 14, 16, 34Austria, 5, 42–44, 47–48, 65, 67,
120–22, 199–200, 202Austro-Hungarian empire, 19,
42–50autobahn, 118avenues, artillery and, 125, 159–60AVH (secret police), 71–72, 92–96,
102–3, 106, 107, 125, 129, 140, 148, 187–88
barack (peach brandy), 122, 131, 164Bartók, Béla, 23Battle of Britain, 1–2Beaverbrook, Max, 171Bem, General, 43–44, 92, 148Beneš, Edvard, 48Benyovszky, Moric, 16–17, 19–20Bercsenyi, Count Laszlo, 17–18Beria, Lavrenty, 78
I N D E X
Index
Biro, Josef, 23bistro (term), 41Boase, T. S. R., 80–81Bodmin, Cornwall, 32–35Bond’s Room, 113–14boulevards, artillery and, 125,
159–60Bracken, Brendan, 83, 171Brankov, Lazar, 73Brassaï, 23Britain. See United KingdomBrown, Harry Joe, Jr. (Coco), 112–
13, 118Budapest, 6, 14, 26, 57, 62–63, 74,
76, 92–97, 107–8, 129–97, 204. See also Hungary
Bulganin, Nikolay, 78, 80–81
Capa, Robert, 23, 112, 116Catholic church, 10, 16, 39, 72, 151,
169–70, 172–73Chelkash (film), 186Churchill, Winston, 67, 170–71classes, emigration and, 18–19cold war. See also communism
author’s experience of Russian language and, 28–37
Soviet repression during, 37–42collectivized agriculture, 10, 69,
79–80communism
cold war and Soviet, 37–42collapse of, 12czarism vs., 41–42goulash, 79, 202with human face, 7, 79, 150Hungarian, xiv, 49–51, 66, 9–70,
79, 202Hungarian Revolution and Soviet,
2–3, 8–9, 66Hungarian student, 143–44
Concise History of Hungary, 76consumer society, 202convoy, evacuation, 196–200
Cooper, Roger, 114–15, 129–75Corda, Maria, 139, 155, 185Cripps, Judy, 141, 153, 190, 204Cripps, Sir Stafford, 141Croatia, 15, 44Csató, Tibor, 114, 131, 134Csoma, Sandor Korosi, 24, 25Cukor, George, 24curfew, 102Curtis, Jamie Lee, 24Curtis, Tony, 24Curtiz, Michael, 24czarism, Russian, 40–42, 46Czechoslovakia, 11, 39, 47–50, 58–
59, 66, 85–86, 87
Daily Express, 140Daily Worker, The, 107Dalrymple, Martha and Ian, 140–43,
145, 151, 159, 170–74Debrecen, 64, 68Directory of Film Arts, 185dual monarchy, 44Dulles, John Foster, 103
eastern Europe, 2–12, 82–87. See also Hungary; Poland; Romania; Czechoslovakia
East Germany, 11, 35–37, 82–87. See also Germany
economy. See also agricultureHungarian, 20–21, 65, 74–76Soviet, 11–12
Eden, Anthony, 104, 152, 170–71educational system, Hungarian,
21–22Egypt. See Suez Canal crisisEichmann, Adolf, 61Eisenhower, Dwight, 103–6, 152,
159, 143–51embassy, Soviet, 29–31. See also
legationsemigration, Hungarian
expatriate Hungarians and, 16–27
214
after Revolution of 1956, 5–7, 18, 202
England. See United Kingdomentertainment business, 22–23eszterházy rostelyos, 138expatriate Hungarians, 16–27. See
also emigration, HungarianEurope, Hungary and, 39. See also
eastern EuropeEuropean Union, xiv, 202
factory workers, 148–50fascism, 50–55Federal Republic of Germany, 81Fermi, Enrico, 23films, 23, 29, 115, 118, 139, 155,
185–86flags
British Union Jack, 120, 129, 197Hungarian, 108, 110, 121
Fleischmann, Charles, 24France, 58. See also Suez Canal crisisFranz Ferdinand, 47Franz Josef, 44–46fraternal socialist countries, 4–5Freedom Fighters, xiv, 100, 110,
143–51, 160–70, 174, 187–88, 192
Gabor sisters, 24gasoline procurement, author’s,
126–28Gaynor, Mitzi, 24Gellért Hotel, 119, 155general strike, 94, 102, 152genius, Hungarian, 23–25geography, 14, 15, 145Germany, 50–52, 55–64, 65, 81, 202.
See also East Germany; West Germany
Gerő, Ernő, 77, 90, 94, 95–96, 99–101, 103
Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 91Gorbachev, Mikhail, 12
goulash communism, 79, 202Great Britain. See United KingdomGreece, 67Greene, Graham, 83, 115–17, 141,
168–70, 205Grove, Andy, 24gymnasia, Hungarian, 21–22Győr, 107, 122, 124–28, 199Gypsy culture, 16, 20, 57
Hajnal, Professor, 131–37Hapsburg empire, 16, 18, 42–44Haraszthy, Agoston, 24Haussmann, Baron, 124Hawn, Goldie, 24Hegedűs, András, 99Hingis, Martina, 24Hitler, Adolf, 51–52, 55–64Hollywood, 186. See also filmsHorthy, Miklós, 18, 21, 25–26, 50–
63, 115, 185Horthy, Nicholas, 155Houdini, Harry, 24Howard, Leslie, 24Hull, Cordell, 61Hungarian-American Association,
23Hungarian Revolutionary Worker-
Peasant government, 174Hungarian Revolution of 1956. See
also Hungaryauthor’s experience of, and this
book about, xiii-xv, 13–14 (see also Korda, Michael)
Budapest after Soviet return, 176–97
Budapest after Soviet withdrawal, 128–43
evacuation of foreigners from Budapest, 197–200
massacre of AVH troops and Soviet withdrawal, 107–10
Rajk’s funeral and beginning of, 91–103
Index 215
Index
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (cont.)
Soviet return to Budapest, 157–75
student Freedom Fighters and, 143–56
Suez Canal crisis and, 103–6 (see also Suez Canal crisis)
as turning point for Soviet communism, 1–12, 201–5
Hungarian Soviet Republic, 50Hungary, 15–27. See also Budapest;
Hungarian Revolution of 1956Austro-Hungarian empire and,
44–47author’s trip behind Iron Curtain
and, 82–87cold war and, 37–39communism of Béla Kun and,
50–51current status of, xiv, 202–5emigration from, and expatriate
Hungarians, 5–7, 16–25, 183, 202
fascism of Miklós Horthy and, 50–55
geography of, 14, 15, 145history of, 14–16, 186–87Korda family and, 21–22, 186–87language of, 19, 34–35, 44Russian czarism and, 39–44secret police (see AVH (secret
police))Soviet repression and salami
tactics in, 65–82, 87–90world sympathy for mythic, 16,
20, 25–27World War I and, 47–50World War II and, 55–64, 184–85
Hyde Park Hotel, 181
India, 3intelligence services, British. See
MI5 and MI6
International Brigades, 112Iron Curtain, 28–37, 65, 82–87. See
also communism; East Germany; Soviet Union
Israel. See Suez CanalItaly, 53–54
Jews. See also anti-Semitismemigration of Hungarian,
18–19Hungarian, 53, 61–63, 71Korda family, 186–87
Joint Services School for Languages, 32
journalists, British, 140–43, 152, 158–59, 170–74. See also media
Kádár, János, 74, 76, 101, 103, 142, 145, 153–54, 174, 196, 201–3
Károlyi, Count Mihály, 48–50Kati (student revolutionary), 160–70,
174, 205Kertész, André, 23KGB, 36Khrushchev, Nikita, 78, 80–81,
87–88, 96, 108–9, 154–55, 203, 204
Kiss, Max, 24Klein, Calvin, 24Kodály, Zoltán, 23, 148Koestler, Arthur, 24Korda, Alexa, 29–30, 114–15Korda, Michael
arrival of, in Budapest after Soviet withdrawal, 128–43
evacuation of, from Budapest, 197–200
experience of Budapest by, after Soviet return, 176–97
experience of
Soviet return to
Budapest by,
xiii xv, 157–75
216
language training of, 31–37 meetings of, with Budapest
students, 143–56preparation for trip to Budapest
by, 111–20trip behind Iron Curtain by,
82–87trip to Budapest by, 120–28
Korda, Sir Alexander, 23, 24, 29–31, 139, 155–56, 171, 185–86
Korda, Vincent, 21–22, 24, 112, 114–15, 118, 148, 155, 185
Korda, Zoltán, 24, 155, 181Kossuth Lajos Utca, 139, 159–60Kovacs, Ernie, 24Kun, Béla, 25–26, 29, 50–51, 115,
185
languageauthor’s training in, 31–37English, 148German, 57Hungarian, 19, 34–35, 44Hungarian fluency in, 19–20Miklósdeutsch, 57, 162
Lauder cosmetics family, 24Lax, Peter, 24legations
American, 170–73British, 152–53, 189–90, 192–97Soviet embassy, 29–31
Leipzig, 85–86Leninism, 10–11, 150. See also
communismLeRoy, Warner, 113Life magazine, 107, 129light cavalry, 17–18Liszt, Franz, 19Lord, Christopher, 114–15, 126–75Lorre, Peter, 24Louis XV, 16–17Lugosi, Bela, 24Lukacs, Paul, 24Lukas, J. Anthony, 24
Madagascar, 16–17magazines. See mediaMagyaróvár, 107Magyars, 34Malenkov, Georgy, 78, 80Maleter, Pal, 102, 142, 156, 191, 202Manchester Guardian, 140Maria Theresa, 17, 20Marshall Plan, 65Marton, Kati, 24Marxism, 150. See also communismmassacres, 107, 187–88Maude, Michael, 82–87, 112, 157media
British journalists, 140–43, 152, 158–59, 170–74
Budapest radio station, 93, 95, 107
Hungarian Revolution and, 5–7, 95
Hungary and, 26Radio Free Europe, 13, 103, 105,
201medical supplies, 114, 116–17, 122,
131–37MI5 and MI6, 13, 32–33, 105, 116–
17, 200, 205Miklósdeutsch language, 57, 162Mikoyan, Anastas, 90, 91, 100, 108,
129, 145Mindszenty, Cardinal József, 72,
129, 151, 172–73Moholy-Nagy, Lázsló, 24Mollet, Guy, 104Molnár, Ferenc, 25Molnár, Miklós, 76Molotov cocktails, 97–98, 166–67Munkacszi, Martin, 23Mussolini, Benito, 51–52mythic Hungary, 16, 20, 25–27
Nagy, Imre, 66, 73, 76–81, 87, 92–103, 108, 128–29, 142–54, 158,
Index 217
Index
172–74, 201–2Nagybánya, 21Namath, Joe, 24national assembly, 68nationalism, Hungarian, 45, 48–49National Poem (Petőfi), ix, 43, 92NATO, xiv, 202Nazi Germany, 51–52, 55–64. See
also GermanyNemzeti dal (poem), ix, 43, 92neutrality, Hungarian, 60Newman, Paul, 24news media. See mediaNKVD, 193nuclear weapons, 68
Oxford University, 111, 144
Paderewski, Ignacy, 48Pallós, Sándor, 185–86Paris Peace Conference, 48–49Parliament, 148, 191peach brandy (barack), 122, 131,
164people’s democracies, 3–4, 7, 37, 72Péter, Gábor, 77, 81, 94Petőfi, Sándor, ix, 43–44, 92, 148Petőfi circle, 90, 92Poland, 10, 11, 15, 39, 42, 47–50,
58–59, 66, 86–87, 90, 91, 103, 108, 145
political prisoners, 76Prague, 39Private Life of Henry VIII, The (film),
23, 139Pulitzer, Joseph, 24Pushkin, Alexander, 33, 123–24
Radio Free Europe, 13, 103, 105, 201
radio station, Budapest, 93, 95, 107Rajk, László, 73–74, 76, 91–92Rákóczi, Prince, 18Rákosi, Mátyás, 69–71, 75, 76–77,
79, 81, 87–90, 91Red Army, 3, 8–9, 12–14, 61–63,
122–24, 129, 176–80, 197–98. See also Soviet Union; tanks, Soviet
Red Cross, 135, 200Red Star Hotel. See Astoria HotelReed, Tracy, 117religion, Nazi Germany and, 55–56.
See also Catholic churchreporters. See journalists, British;
mediaRobertson, Jaquelin T. ( Jack), 112–
13, 118Robertson, Walter, 113Romania, 11, 15, 20, 48–50, 59, 61, 67Roosevelt, Franklin, 67Royal Air Force, 31, 161Rubik’s Cube, 24Russia. See Soviet UnionRussian language, 31–37
Sacher Hotel, 114, 118–20Sadovy, John, 107, 129salami tactics, 70–72schools, Hungarian, 21Second Medical Clinic, 131–37secret police. See AVH (secret police)Seinfeld, Jerry, 24Seles, Monica, 24Serov, Ivan, 156show business, 22–23. See also filmsSimon, Paul, 24Sinkovics, Imre, 92Skardon, C. Philip, 97, 105Slovakia, 15, 44, 59Slovenia, 44snipers, 179socialism. See communismSoros, George, 24Soviet Union. See also communism;
Stalin, Josephcold war repression of Hungary
by, 37–42, 66
218
current status of, xiv, 12, 203–4Hungarian Revolution as turning
point for, 1–12, 201–5London embassy of, 29–31Red Army of, 3, 8–9, 12–14, 61–
63, 122–24, 129, 176–80, 197–98
Russian czarism and, 37–42Russian language and, 31–37United States relations with, 159war of, against Hungarian people,
xiv (see also Hungarian Revolution of 1956)
World War II and, 59–64Spanish Civil War, 112Spears, Edward, 31Stalin, Joseph
Budapest statue of, 12, 93–94, 148–49
Stalinism of, 10–11, 37–42, 65–78, 81, 87, 150 (see also communism)
strike, general, 94, 102, 152student revolutionaries, 143–51,
160–70, 174, 188. See also Freedom Fighters
Suez Canal crisis, 13–14, 103–6, 111–12, 129, 142–43, 154, 156, 170–71, 174, 193, 201
Suslov, Mikhail, 100, 108, 129, 145Szilard, Leo, 24Szold, Henrietta, 24
tanks, Soviet, 97–98, 102–3, 161, 176–79, 181–83, 192, 197–98. See also Red Army
Taylor, Russell, 114–15, 118, 125, 129–75
Teleki, Count Samuel, 24Teller, Edward, 24That Hamilton Woman (film), 29Third Man, The (film), 115, 118Tito, Marshal Josip, 70, 87
Trade Union of Artists and Designers, 185
Transylvania, 20Treaty of Trianon, 15, 20Turkey, 16
United KingdomBritish legation in Budapest, 152–
53, 189–90, 192–97India and, 3MI5 and MI6, 13, 32–33, 105,
116–17, 200, 205Oxford University, 111, 144Soviet embassy in London, 29–31students, 143–44Suez Canal crisis and, 13–14,
103–6 (see also Suez Canal crisis)
Union Jack flag of, 120, 129, 197World War II and, 58, 61
United Nations, 108, 154, 159United States, 13–14, 18, 61, 103,
105–6, 152, 159, 170–73
Vienna, 19–20, 47, 114. See also Austria
Volkswagens, 118, 203von Neumann, John, 24Voroshilov, Marshal, 69
Wallenberg, Raoul, 68Warsaw Pact, 7, 81, 108–9, 144–45,
154Washington, George, 23Waugh, Evelyn, 169Weissmuller, Johnny, 24West Germany, 5, 35–37, 84. See also
GermanyWiesel, Elie, 24Wilson, Woodrow, 48World War I, 47–50World War II, 55–64, 184–85
Index 219
Yugoslavia, 4, 70, 87, 108, 154–55
Zhukov, Marshal, 128
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author MICHAEL KORDA’s books
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Charmed Lives. He lives with his wife, Margaret, in Dutchess
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